Turndown service

Now that her internship is almost finished, Giselle cannot wait to sleep until the sun comes up.

Sleeping for more than nine hours was easy when I never had class in the morning, but it’s difficult now that I have to be in the office every day. I’m almost done with my internship, and part of me cannot really wait to go back to sleeping until the sun comes up every day. Still, I feel shame, because I have the ambition to lead a grand intellectual life, with a series of successes that will force me to get up early more often and go to bed late. How much sleep am I willing to give up?

When I started studying, the book My Year of Rest and Relaxation was very much a thing among neurotic young women with excessive internet use. The main character, a beautiful young layabout with an enormous inheritance, tries to shut out the outside world by numbing herself with sleeping pills. Her use of medication escalates until she is barely awake for months on end.

She loves sleeping because she has to do nothing and feels nothing, yet still feels that she feels nothing. When I did not have a permanent home, I slept a lot. I had to leave my temporary room in Kralingen because the landlady was coming back from holiday. In fact, I was supposed to pack my things and move to Tarwewijk, but her bed was comfortable and I wanted to feel nothing.

My dream is to live in a hotel with turndown service. That is where I’ll find the balance between my ambition never to be awake for more than 15 hours and that grand intellectual life. While I’m out for dinner, or at the theatre, or having a deep conversation, someone comes into my hotel room, closes the curtains, plumps up my pillow and folds back the corner of my duvet. In this way, the bed almost reaches out to me, with open arms. When I come home and kick off my heels, I let myself be embraced.