Morning, Good Morning
The sun’s not out yet. Damn! The sun is not out yet!
But I’m up, and I can’t go back to sleep. The house is too hot. Steph says she’s cold, so we keep the heater going, even though the temperature outside starting rising weeks ago. But Steph’s always cold, even at the height of summer. I believe her because whenever her feet touch me when we’re in bed it feel like a popsicle hitting my leg and startles me awake, motionless, counting sheep or trying to concentrate on the Federal Reserve’s policy on modern monetary theory.
So I get up and perform the perfunctory hygienic rituals that make me acceptable to the rest of the world. The pre-dawn cleansing of my body that suggests I know what I’m doing because I woke up today and decided to be clean.
I decided to not listen to the voice in my head saying that it doesn’t matter.
I don’t think anyone is buying it.
I know I’m not.
Afterwards, I go to the kitchen and prepare breakfast. Black coffee and an english muffin that I hope hasn’t molded even though it’s been in the pantry 2 weeks past its sell-by date–a random date on the calendar that’s more likely a suggestion rather than a hard stop to when the english muffin can be consumed. I place a generous helping of raspberry jam on the english muffin after microwaving it because I think putting it in the toaster would be too much effort, even though it doesn’t take that much longer.
Before sitting down to eat and down caffeine molecules, I look at the digital clock on the over that’s notoriously inaccurate. It doesn’t tell real time, just whatever damn time it chooses to. Which I can respect. Despite how inconvenient it is at times. Even with the oven’s clock being off, it’s still too damn early. The solar clock still nestled comfortably in the crook of the horizon.
In these early hours, I think about what my day looks like, or at least what it should look like. I create a mental check list of what needs to get done, what I want to accomplish, and what I’ve put off for far too long. The list for what I put off keeps growing larger and larger day by day, so I try not to focus on it too much, or else the depressing thoughts start to filter in. Then I start down a mental road of how I haven’t really done anything productive with my life. I’m reminded of Mozart and all he accomplished in his teens. Then I’m reminded of Einstein and all he did before turning 25. But most of all, I think about Taylor Swift and the enormity of her accomplishments, and the fact that I’m 2 years older than she is. But that shouldn’t matter, because I don’t have a fraction of the talent of any of those people.
And so in the first hour of consciousness, when everyone else in the apartment complex is asleep, except maybe those getting home from their graveyard shift at their amzn warehouse jobs picking gallons upon gallons of butt paste that gets purchased at an alarming pace by countless Americans everyday, and I realize the list I made for myself and what I wanted to make of my day doesn’t matter, and sometimes all that’s important is just waking up and writing down the sentence, ‘I’m alive,’ which keeps me chuggin’ along.
Fred Aiken Writing 