Morning Wakeup by Mac Clevinger, May 15, 2017
A bullet lodged in your spine, or a few chemicals in your head that shouldn’t be there. Doesn’t matter which you’re suffering from, either way you’re not getting up until you’re well and truly ready to. Sometimes I lie here, pretending it’s one and not the other that keeps me wasting away in a bed long after I’ve woken up. Even if I could get up, what would I do?
So I just lie here, try to make myself comfy, and I either drift in and out of dreams or stare blankly at the wall. I think, but it’s like a hamster in its wheel: the thoughts go in circles, either in painful memory or circling the drain of despair that makes me wish to be asleep or sat in front of a television to distract myself with.
I’m here now. I’m always here, in bed, until I’m not. Then it feels like I’m wasting time until I’m back here and can safely return to blank stares and half-dreams that leave me feeling half-empty when I wake up. I forget if I can feel the sheets – am I warm enough? Is my head being held up by my pillow? Do I even care – is this even real, or another half-dream?
I roll over, or try to, giving up on the thought. The ocean’s gone as I can see parts of my room, and the columns of light against the wall tell me it’s day. I should get up, stretch, eat something, do something, be a real person and talk and stuff. I rise maybe an inch and collapse back into my pillow, managing a quick spin as I fall to face away from the muddy wall and sink back into the warmth of the fabric.
A desk, some instruments, another wall, and a side-view of the window casting daylight into my world. I could get up and close the blinds, and perhaps in the attempt realize how marvelous it is to finally get out of bed and begin a new day, the first day of a new life where I feel hopeful and spectacular and like the world is my oyster to unravel and discover so long as I hold on to that feeling for every second of my life and never lose it again not even once.
I moan and dig my head into the pillow, feeling a fuzzy warmth spreading over me. Rebuilding my life from scratch sounds like a lot of work, and it’d be so much easier to follow the feeling I already have. It’s a special kind of feeling, one that you enjoy losing but is always there for you when you ‘need’ it. Maybe it’s more of a non-feeling, an apathy where your mind is disconnected from your body so you can’t worry about not doing anything because you can’t do anything in the first place.
I nuzzle deeper and walk out my door, a sunny view of the trees passing across my vision as I arrive somewhere vaguely familiar with people I don’t know but can name immediately. Blank faces across from me at the table, formless bodies and indistinct clothing, a menu in my hands I can’t read but know by heart. It’s a script for me to follow with only the word ‘improvise’ written on it, the plot in my mind to follow and the world to make reality.
The dreams aren’t life, they’re my brain trying to make stories from whatever scraps it can pull together. Life isn’t a series of big moments that you hold together as a roadmap for the plot, life happens between the scenes you see on television, after the climax and before the ’twenty years later’ card they drop to cut out the boring stuff.
These dreams try, though; it throws together big scenes of the little things that don’t matter, that pass the time, and it runs through it too fast to register besides a still image or a few seconds in my conscious mind. I’m with someone, the script says we’re both nude, but we’re not interacting at all because they’re with someone else and we’re not interested.
I’m staring at the ceiling now, awake. I put a name to the missing face, remember formless shapes that take bulbous forms and warp the memory as decay hammers it down to the base parts of a barebone script. Is there a message? Is this confirmation of things I assume? Affirmation, telling me I’m wrong, is there meaning or have I made it from nonsense?
It plays in my head and I think, and I think, and I think, and I think, and it’s the same thought over and over again but there are no other thoughts to think so I think, and I think, and I think, and I roll over to look at the wall and it’s the same wall. Melted chocolate sundae. Infinitely deep and an inch of dairy at the same time.
It’d be nice to get up and do something, but there isn’t enough energy at the nape of my neck. I can feel where it should be, where everything tightens up when it’s missing and where it’s free and open when it wants to work and let me be me. But I can’t get up because it’s empty, the fuel tanks are dry – if you tried to draw anything out of them then they’d crumple up, except it isn’t a fuel tank it’s me and I’d crumple up into nothing but misaligned bones and parts that don’t want to work anymore.
They don’t want to work now, but at least I know they can. Or, I’m pretty sure they can. It feels like if someone tried to kill me I could fight back no problem, but god forbid I try to walk over to my desk and open the computer. No; I’m fine, I work, I just lack drive. Want, need, a will – I want to do things, but my body doesn’t.
But, then, what do I want to do? What does the mind want that the body denies it? Do I have a purpose, a reason for getting out of bed, or am I just supposed to and that’s supposed to be enough? What about when that isn’t enough, and there’s nothing else dragging me out? Do I just lie here forever, waste away, die? Am I a machine that, without purpose, decays while waiting for a new one?
I roll over, the thoughts gone in the motion, and drag the covers over my head with a shifted shoulder. My eyes are barely-open slits, a hazy sea of blue reality that could overcome me and become a new dream, or it may not. I don’t know, I don’t control it, don’t control anything here. To control is to do an act, and I’m resolutely doing nothing while time wastes away.
All the things I could be doing, that I have done when I got up early. Food, art, music, reading, playing a game at the very least – at least they’re doing something and being a part of a world even if it’s a small world because why go outside when there’s nothing to do there besides be outside? Here the world is my head and the thoughts that race around in circles and the phrases that get stuck in a loop a loop a loop a loop a loop a loop –
Roll over. The size of the world. Here it’s me, outside the door it becomes slightly larger, going outside it becomes massive. Every option available, every store to go to, every person to perhaps meet, every place to go, which option is better which option uses the time best which option is the one I should do because life is about more than just maximizing time efficiency and doing what you’re told is the best and why is this so hard to figure out shouldn’t this just be something I know that’s easy oh fuck.
I’m not asleep, but I’m not getting up. It’s light outside, maybe it’s ten in the morning, maybe it’s four in the afternoon, I don’t know where the sun is supposed to be right now, or what the sun’s placement means. How hard would it be to know that? To spend two seconds looking at the sun in the morning to know if it casts into my room or not? Why don’t I know that?
What is this feeling, when I lie in bed awake but know that it’s a lie. If I get up everything will rush at me in an instant and I’ll be bleary and tired and remember why I was in bed in the first place because if you’re this tired after sleeping it must have meant you didn’t sleep enough so go back to bed and wait until you feel like yourself again because it’s been so long since you’ve been yourself and it’d be nice to be you again for one fucking minute.
I don’t feel the pain that’s coming, of every limb resisting the pressure to arise. I feel fine, like I could go for a run if I wanted to or do any of those things you see people with incurable diseases doing in the commercials. There’s so much I have to do before I can do anything, so long to wait before I can fail to accomplish the things I’ve been putting off by lying in bed.
This feeling isn’t forever, but it’s always here when I wake up and it’s always waiting for when the other feelings go away. The non-feeling of apathy and despair where pleasant phrases about the point being that we try in the face of it all become so much useless crap because when you feel or don’t feel like this how could anyone think that that is going to help.
And then it does help, because it makes me realize that doing literally anything is how I can tell the apathy to go away and it gives me a bit of anger at the weights that keep me bound so that I can start the motions of getting up and trying to start a day where the greatest achievement was that it started, and I started it by my own willpower, and maybe if I do it today it will be easier tomorrow.