I’ve started waking up close to 6am every day — just before, maybe ten or fifteen minutes or so — with a dull sense of consciousness nagging at me, preventing me from falling back asleep. There’s no other way to describe it; it’s a different flavor of waking up than mid-night awakening, when it’s easy to slip back under the metaphorical blanket of sleep without a care even after getting up to piss or whatever. At 6 or thereabouts, something in the back of my head whispers, you don’t really want to sleep again. I know you think you do, but I know better and you, my friend, are wrong.
And so, I lie there as the rest of my mind washes up on shore, systems slowly booting up for the rest of the day. I’d like to say that I’m being thoughtful and mindful during this entire time, but that’s not really the case; usually, my conscious mind is in a daze, still, stuttering and fluttering around trying to get started while I look out the window at the marvelous, terrifying silhouette of the overgrown tree directly outside against whatever kind of sky is happening that particular morning. I’m not thinking thinking, not yet; that happens later.
As all of this happens (slowly, it feeds like, although my perspective might be off in that regard), the rest of my body starts to check in: my belly, my bladder, my shoulders, the whole aching, aging shebang. I can tell how hard I slept from whether or not my ear hurts from pushing my head into the pillow all night when I was out, or if I was twisted around to the point where my back hurts. As I’m lying there, wondering what makes this my silent wake up call time each day, my body chimes in as if to say, hey, sleep wasn’t necessarily all it was cracked up to be either.
Sometimes, I stop to think about how easily I used to wake up, how instantaneously it appeared to happen. Othertimes, I marvel at the fact that we make it through the process every single day.