Waking (a work in progress)

Waking up is a Lalah Hathaway ballad serenading a dream through a jammed alarm clock. It mocks her contralto even as it does not disturb its perfection. Waking is looking carefully for just the right moment to go beyond opened eyelids to fuller presence: shower-rain, toothbrush, the ouch of warm feet on cool-morning tile. Waking seemed crudely impossible but necessary, in the way that people sometimes find the courage to die or like taking medicine that makes you sick to keep you from getting sick.

He watched the intervals pass: six-fifty-one, six fifty-five—all the while knowing that his life was fifteen minutes faster than it was supposed to be. He was one of those cats who wanted to outrun the future so that he’d feel safer. He wanted to master the science of time and interaction, so they nothing would catch him off guard. He wanted the calculus of life simplified as a fraction—not half empty or half-full, just half. Just half wouldn’t feel happy or sad, so he would be spared the bite of extremities. Neither heaven nor hell seemed places he’d want to retire his spirit, so he waited a few minutes more before spinning his body around to meet to crisp air that awaiting his nakedness outside the down comforters.

His room was predictable, orderly in a way that masked the dust lingering about the space. It was a conceited IKEA showroom that wanted privacy. He diligently choreographed the space, as stubborn to change as his ears were to Incognito and Maysa’s “Deep Water” on their Positivity CD. There was a disturbing addition to the kind of blues that created more shadow than light in this room without a window. But there was sunlight: his poetry, the shine off his computer screen, pictures of people who loved him dancing about the walls.

Most of the rooms he’d slept in all his life had that same feel—except for the room he shared with his ex. There were lots of things he missed about that room; about having to suspend the certainty of how it'd be found, like the imprint of his lover's nap there upon coming home. Loving somehow helped him get over this delusion of predictability. But that was his old life—it had escaped his consciousness on purpose. He simply disremembered it. Those memories haunted him, reminded him of the ways his heart had tricked or failed him. The guise of cool and resolve has a habit of snapping him awake-- waking him up at three-thirty a.m., reminded that he hates sleeping alone—hates the hollow echo of clock ticking or the couple upstairs stirring into and out of boot-knocking.

He once met a therapist with a crazy theory that super-orderly people create order in spaces to offset the chaos they experience with things they can’t control: who they love, those loud glances at Metro stops, people with intentions to mask evil with blue suits. It simply wasn’t that deep for him. This room, this safe-sanctuary was one of the few things that had never failed him, left him lonely, grown overburdened with his affection.