Boston, MA

It’s four in the morning on a Thursday and I should be sleeping, warm in my relatively luxurious bed across the common in 150. Instead I’m sitting on a cold floor next to a dismantled futon in someone else’s grotty apartment next to the State House garden, a giant bronze eagle souring up towards my window on it’s massive stone plinth. Library books are spread about me, as is a empty gallon of chocolate chip ice cream , several bananas and a flashlight I’ve propped towards my text so I can read as I type. Now I’ve spaced out for a few hours, time I spent looking out of the window and trying to work. The latter is a painful process of keypunching, head holding and yawning as I try to balance my torch on a table beside me.

I wish I’d just gone home to sleep instead of trying to do my work, but a awful English deadline looms six hours away and as the sun rises I still can’t be bothered to walk back to my dorm from my friends house. I’ve been here a long time, since before noon yesterday and at first the prospect of working from a roof seemed to a good one. I set up my torch and books but the wind drove me off and I was relegated to the living room. A good idea really, if I had fallen asleep it would have been really easy to roll off the tiny space I’d been crouched on and become squashed four floors below. Oh god, I’m tired and writing was definitely a bad idea, as was ice cream for two breakfasts in a row. You know your tired, I've decided, when your playing Final Countdown and singing slowly along to the lyrics in a monotone. I guess Kings of leon and that hey ho-hey ho song by the Ramones will have to do and keep me awake. Luckily help is on the way, for looking across the common in the growing light I can see the lights going on in Capital Coffee, a safe haven for businessmen, politicians and caffeine starved students. University is nearly over for the semester, soon I’ll be in Costa Rica and able to relax for the first time in a while. I’m keen to keep writing now but whatever sense is left in me knows that my vocabulary has halved and my sentences transformed into the equivalent of sludge.