It has been a while since it first started visiting me. That night I was up late to prepare for the next day’s quiz, but I didn’t know where to start. I was doodling some gibberish on my notebook when I heard something tapping on the window. I went to the window and opened it. There was the Sloth.

The Sloth comes to my window when I am up late working. Usually past midnight, about the time my concentration starts to fade.

Sloths live most of their lives up in trees. Hanging upside down from trees, gravity gives them shape. But once they are on the ground, they look like slow-moving old mops. The Sloth crawls in over the windowsill and falls on the floor like a Jell-O. And he asks:
“Have you some water?”

Then he lazily searches in a plastic bag that he brought and gets two boiled eggs out. He hands me one. After we eat the extremely dry hardboiled eggs in silence and wash them down with glasses of water, he smiles with yellow teeth and stretches his arm out to pat my back.

“Good, ya?”  

One time I politely refused the offer. The Sloth was visibly disappointed. He exhaled with a deep trembling sigh. His narrow shoulders dropped so much that I thought he would melt into the floor. Since then I have never rejected his eggs.

Sometimes he pulls out the latest tabloid magazine. He spends the whole time quietly turning the pages; sometimes he gossips about celebrities in the news. His opinions are always repeats of someone’s comments he heard on TV. After spending about half an hour in my room, the Sloth crawls out the window. I am not quite sure what I think of this visitor, but I find myself missing him if a month passes without seeing him. I have started keeping a carafe of water in my study every night in case of dry hardboiled eggs.

I never know where the Sloth goes after he leaves my room. Once he had hair rollers on his head and was acting restlessly. I asked what he was up to, but he just mumbled: “interview” or “ big deal” or something.
After I see the Sloth off I go straight to bed, even if I haven’t finished my work, my enthusiasm drains away as the Sloth vanishes into the dark. Only the aftertaste of hardboiled egg remains.

-That is how the Sloth comes to visit me.