I"ve always been a little lazy about mornings. I think the only times I bound out of bed with energy is when I have something to do immediately--something exciting (like running a race or travelling), or something pressing (like having to finish grading or work). So it has been especially hard that this recent time has been punctuated for me by early morning clarity.
I hate early morning clarity. It literally makes me sick to my stomach; like the surge of hormones in a pregnant woman's body suddenly pooling nausea in her belly and throat, my morning clarity seizes my entire digestive tract. The snooze on the alarm isn't enough to cloud the thoughts streaming in like daylight; the thoughts are already burrowed in my mind, and only a new deep sleep would erase them. If only I had gotten drunk the night before, I think with grim sadness, I could have slept through it. But now I'm too restless for a return, so I fitfully toss around my bed, amongst pillows and cats, and I do something like moan. Moan is the right term, although no sound comes out--a silent moan into bright morning air.
I wake up having forgotten for a moment. Then I awaken fully to the clarity of the end, of all the steps to the end, of all the possible detours and alternate paths on the road lined out. So I wake up with the sense (false or not--truth is not the point at all, at all, and even that has its own lamentation) that I could have stopped it, could have prevented the sudden snapping that happened -- because I saw the snap and couldn't believe it. I had no senses to take it in.
Snap, like a twig, but a twig from some magical and necessary branch only spoken about in folk tales. It was a limp snapping, though very sudden. It didn't make any satisfying sound. Not like Beyle's branch full of salt crystals, the exemplum of love itself. So many things muffle the sound of the snap when it happens--sighs, gazes, the music innocently playing in the background, etc. If it were a movie, the image would be a bird flying suddenly from a limb with an insignifcant flutter of wings. And afterward, there is no afterward, there is only during. So, during your during, you don't know anything. You don't have the senses in place, beyond those needed for nausea.
And if all of this clarity came to me in a drunken, self-doubting haze, I could dismiss it. "But", I could say, "the end can't be attributed to just a few days" -- (but then, what's the definition of the end?). Oh yes, I know. But it comes to me in the biting clear of the morning. It comes over me with the insistent bleat of an internal alarm clock. I awake, and I feel it settle in around me. And there's no more rest. Morning, waking, ending, and ending, morning, waking.
I hate early morning clarity. It literally makes me sick to my stomach; like the surge of hormones in a pregnant woman's body suddenly pooling nausea in her belly and throat, my morning clarity seizes my entire digestive tract. The snooze on the alarm isn't enough to cloud the thoughts streaming in like daylight; the thoughts are already burrowed in my mind, and only a new deep sleep would erase them. If only I had gotten drunk the night before, I think with grim sadness, I could have slept through it. But now I'm too restless for a return, so I fitfully toss around my bed, amongst pillows and cats, and I do something like moan. Moan is the right term, although no sound comes out--a silent moan into bright morning air.
I wake up having forgotten for a moment. Then I awaken fully to the clarity of the end, of all the steps to the end, of all the possible detours and alternate paths on the road lined out. So I wake up with the sense (false or not--truth is not the point at all, at all, and even that has its own lamentation) that I could have stopped it, could have prevented the sudden snapping that happened -- because I saw the snap and couldn't believe it. I had no senses to take it in.
Snap, like a twig, but a twig from some magical and necessary branch only spoken about in folk tales. It was a limp snapping, though very sudden. It didn't make any satisfying sound. Not like Beyle's branch full of salt crystals, the exemplum of love itself. So many things muffle the sound of the snap when it happens--sighs, gazes, the music innocently playing in the background, etc. If it were a movie, the image would be a bird flying suddenly from a limb with an insignifcant flutter of wings. And afterward, there is no afterward, there is only during. So, during your during, you don't know anything. You don't have the senses in place, beyond those needed for nausea.
And if all of this clarity came to me in a drunken, self-doubting haze, I could dismiss it. "But", I could say, "the end can't be attributed to just a few days" -- (but then, what's the definition of the end?). Oh yes, I know. But it comes to me in the biting clear of the morning. It comes over me with the insistent bleat of an internal alarm clock. I awake, and I feel it settle in around me. And there's no more rest. Morning, waking, ending, and ending, morning, waking.
