When I think about the best sleep I'd ever gotten in my life, I think about the sleep I got right after I graduated college.

  Let me paint the picture for you. A few weeks before I graduated, a now ex-girlfriend and I ended things after two and a half years. I was moving to Seattle so it wouldn't have worked out. Graduation was on a Saturday (5-3-2025) and I was moving out that Sunday Morning, only to then drive nine hours to Texas. Also, I was letting some guy sublease my apartment till the lease ended in July, and he was coming the morning I was leaving.

  That Saturday night I went out with my friends to a bar just one last time. It was weird seeing my ex girlfriend there. We were so freshly broken up that having to force myself to recontextualize our relationship at a bar felt so foreign to me. I don't think any of the drinking was helping either.

  I wasn't having fun so I walked home alone. Eventually some people came back from the bars and we talked about things and life for a few hours. Before you know it, it was two in the morning. People started to trickle away. My roommate of four years and best friend just laid with me on the couch until I had to wake up and move. It was very bittersweet. It reminded me of when we had to share a bedroom in those suite-style dorms the first two years of college. I had gotten maybe four hours of sleep.

  Now it was morning and I had just finished moving the last of my boxes. I said my goodbyes to my roommates and then that was it. I was off to Texas. My dad and I took turns but really I took the bulk of the driving. It might sound strange but I'd rather be driving than sitting passenger. Driving is just so much more stimulating and sitting passenger gets boring.

  In those nine hours I just thought about so many things. It felt strange leaving the South after four years and leaving everything behind. All the relationships I've had, friends I've made, etcetera etcetera. It felt like I was being precisely and surgically removed from a life I'd spent four years building. Like I was written off of a show after four seasons. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that life would go on in the south without me; Would my friends really continue living without me????

  I can't believe I'm saying this, but I was a little sad, even though I spent four years touting about how much I wanted to leave the south. I was so naively optimistic about moving to Seattle and living on the west coast for the first time. I had no idea what the next few months of my life were going to be like because it just felt so undefined to me. One month I'm visiting Boston with a girl I've been dating for years, the next month we break up, the next month I graduate and move back home, and then the month after that move to a place where I don't know anyone at all on an entirely new coast. I guess this was my west coast American dream.

  I'd thought about this, and many, many other things on the drive back. We got to the place we were staying at in Texas, some farm my dad's friend owned, and ate a little bit. I was so exhausted from drinking the previous night and driving all day that I didn't even bothering freshening up before I slept.

  I don't think it was any of the material things that made that sleep so good. The bed was fine, and the blanket and pillows weren't special. I think it was just the circumstances that made the sleep so good. It took me no time at all to fall asleep, and when I was asleep, I was snoring so loudly that I was waking myself up, but I was so deep into sleep and exhaustion that I did not fully wake up. Like two wolves inside me fighting. It was a strange feedback loop. I don't ever snore. It was a weird out of body experience. It felt like my body wanted me to see/hear this.

  I woke up feeling the best I'd ever felt in my life. I showered all of the filth away. I never understood how it felt to truly feel well rested until I stood up that morning and stretched. It's like my body did a factory reset, or I had some overnight metamorphosis. Then there was the remaining 11 hour drive back to Denver where I would stay for a few weeks until it was another 20 hours to Seattle. Before we drove off the farm there were cows at the gate that I took a picture of. On the way back, I wondered if the cows slept as well as I did, on this very quiet little farm.