As she laid her heavy head against the pillow and tried to find the path into a peaceful sleep, Elena would lay awake for a while ruminating over the day’s many events and insights. One time and another she caught herself uttering words deep under her breath, since she couldn’t stop herself from turning the words she could still remember Doc had said over and over again in her mind. At some point, the quiet sounds of the piano from downstairs chimed in with her seemingly silent cogitations, yet they had a certain loudness inside her mind. While tossing and turning around on the bed, in an attempt to find a comfortable position to sleep, she found herself more and more listening to the calming piano sound she could hear when pressing her ear against the mattress. For a while she eavesdropped on it, all while her eyelids became heavier and heavier. At some point they would fall completely shut, and guided by the soothing melodies of Mozart would she sink into the sleep she had long been mooning for already.
It was by far not the most peaceful sleep one could have imagined, but for Elena’s recent standards, the rest was well-nigh gold. And so it came to no surprise that, when she awoke the following day, the first she would do was to lengthily yawn with relish, sitting up straight on the bed. One thing she could already say for sure was that she had for once not suffered under bad dreams, else she would have been in a totally different condition than the almost rested one she was in right now. What she still could remember from her dreams were rather fragmentary, but it must had been some minorly altered version of their talk downstairs she had lived through during the night again. Some of his words she even now still pondered over in her mind, but they made a lot less sense than they had made yesterday, she found.
Still in a benighted state did she climb out of bed and stumbled over to the bathroom to freshen up. It was only at this point reality seemed to catch up with her again as she glanced into the large mirror behind the washbasin and spotted herself; even the most peaceful slumber had not helped with her almost sickly pale skin, she realized, and so she sighed, this time in no content at all. Slumping down a little, she would get over her usual morning routine fairly quickly, interrupted by occasional spells of yawning. That the last day, or in extension the last couple of weeks, had drained her of much of her inner strengths, if there actually were any left, she could still feel far too much for her likings. She felt inanimate as ever, so to say, just as she had come to know from some of the worse days of the past months.
She would have loved nothing better than to plunk down into bed again and catch another sleep, but a quick glance at the clock told her that it was already late enough. And with the daylight shining through the room’s window so excessively, she would hardly be able to fall asleep once more. Thus, instead of holing up in the room, with a grunt she decided to have a look downstairs and see whether she would find Doc already awake or not. There was a brief shudder that ran down her spine as she walked down the hallway towards the staircase, still in a somewhat drowsy state of mind. Above all, she was tired – of everything.
