an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space

I woke up at around 5AM.

I can't say I'm surprised at that; I went to bed at around 11:30AM yesterday/Friday, didn't probably fall asleep until maybe 12:15pm, though I wasn't watching the clock, but things kept occurring to me, waking me up. Had things to do yesterday, important things, promised things, but that rarely stops me from sleeping even if I want it to, and I was so very, very tired.

[edited to add: yes, I slept roughly 16 hours.]

I was surprised after I woke up, though, because the first thought in my head was a chorus from a song I listened to maybe a week ago—

oh
what do i do
what do i do
what do i do

what do i do
without you

— fully formed, like his high-pitched sadness had sung its way into my nerves, coiling deftly around my musculature, avoiding my veins, sunk in like varicella zoster (the common chickenpox virus) turns into herpes zoster around my spine, and here, here is an outbreak, ringing in my head.

Stress does it for shingles; I think most people don't even know that's why someone gets shingles: chicken pox as a child, virus sinks in around the nerves, and then you have a nasty dermatome, which is the area of skin administered by a particular spinal nerve, because that's where the virus hides, and then... then when you're under stress, it comes out again in an outbreak.

The outbreak is painful and it's red and it's itchy, and I'm nearly certain it feels nothing like a broken heart, but I wouldn't know—having neither had shingles nor, if you ask many people, a heart that could be broken.

The Mountain Goats - Woke Up New