I’m thirty. When you reach thirty, you realize it’s not the end of the world. I’m not especially happy about getting older, but it does make some things easier. It’s a question of attitude. One thing I know for sure, though: If a thirty-year-old woman loves her body and is serious about keeping it looking the way it should, she has to put in a certain amount of effort. I learned that from my mother. She used to be a slim, lovely woman, but not anymore. I don’t want the same thing to happen to me.

After I’ve had my swim, I use the rest of my afternoon in various ways. Sometimes I’ll wander over to the station plaza and window-shop. Sometimes I’ll go home, curl up on the sofa, and read a book or listen to the FM station or just rest. Eventually, my son comes home from school. I help him change into his playclothes, and give him a snack. When he’s through eating, he goes out to play with his friends. He’s too young to go to an afternoon cram school, and we aren’t making him take piano lessons or anything. “Let him play,” says my husband. “Let him grow up naturally.” When my son leaves the house, I have the same little dialogue with him as I do with my husband. “Be careful,” I say, and he answers, “Don’t worry.”

As evening approaches, I begin preparing dinner. My son is always back by six. He watches cartoons on TV. If no emergency patients show up, my husband is home before seven. He doesn’t drink a drop and he’s not fond of pointless socializing. He almost always comes straight home from work.

The three of us talk during dinner, mostly about what we’ve done that day. My son always has the most to say. Everything that happens in his life is fresh and full of mystery. He talks, and we offer our comments. After dinner, he does what he likes—watches television or reads or plays some kind of game with my husband. When he has homework, he shuts himself up in his room and does it. He goes to bed at 8:30. I tuck him in and stroke his hair and say good night to him and turn off the light.

Then it’s husband and wife together. He sits on the sofa, reading the newspaper and talking to me now and then about his patients or something in the paper. Then he listens to Haydn or Mozart. I don’t mind listening to music, but I can never seem to tell the difference between those two composers. They sound the same to me. When I say that to my husband, he tells me it doesn’t matter. “It’s all beautiful. That’s what counts.”

“Just like you,” I say.

“Just like me,” he answers with a big smile. He seems genuinely pleased.

SO THAT’S MY LIFE—or my life before I stopped sleeping—each day pretty much a repetition of the one before. I used to keep a diary, but if I forgot for two or three days, I’d lose track of what had happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I’d sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was—very simply—amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them.