The morning got away from me today. It was still dark when I woke up. I don't know how long I laid in the liminal blackness between the time I shut my eyes and when my alarm was supposed to ring, but it was longer than I would have liked to. No matter which position I put my body in, sleep wouldn't come. For as long as I can can remember I've struggled with sleep, suffering from nightmares, insomnia, sleep paralysis, and intense, vivid dreams, all of which leave me feeling generally unrested when the morning arrives. It's rare that I wake up energized and recharged. Strangely, it isn't a mental lassitude that stalks me, but rather a physical one. Always my body aches, plagued by stiffness and fatigue, on a cellular level. Sometimes I can feel it in my bones—in my kneecaps, or shins, the vertebrae of my spine, the knuckles on my hands, or in the small bones of my ankles.
So last night, I'm in bed sleeping and out of nowhere a shooting pain blasts me right in the fucking cranium. Shooting pain. It feels like lightning. I close my eyes wincing, waiting for it to pass, but it doesn't. An invisible screw climbing slowly into my skull. Like a dentist's drill, a narrow, precise, spinning with great speed and alacrity as it buries itself in my brain. Clutching my head in my hands, I breathe and wait. The sensation washes over my scalp and down into my temples in waves. An army man, hidden in a foxhole and beset by bombs, must have suffered from the same problems when they burst around him. Full on detonations at close range—how loud would those explosions have been? Would you go deaf? Those old bombs were built like iron cannonballs, forged in hot furnaces and later packed with ammonium nitrate and TNT, if you were lucky. If not, and you got a bomb lobbed at you full of chlorine or phosgene gas, then if the shrapnel didn't kill you, the gas would. Worse still would be mustard gas, but let's not think of that. Did you know that 25% of all shells fired during the war didn't explode? Millions of highly unstable unexploded ordnance remain in the ground. Sometimes on the news you'll see a story about how they found one in Berlin or somewhere in France. From the news-copter, bomb squads in hazmat suits holding high tech defusing equipment will be seen marching stoically to the site, the street cordoned off by police. Lying in early this morning, I had the distinct feeling I was lying on a landmine. One wrong move and it would be lights out.
Finally, defeated, I reach for my phone and tap on the sleeping screen. It shows exactly 6:00. The chickens are already awake. The rooster is ruffling his feathers, jumping down off his perch and getting into position behind the feed tray, a dwindling supply of icy seeds and grains spread thinly over the wooden trough. He leans back, tilts his head and crows to greet the cold morning air. I can see it all in my mind clearly. I give up thinking about it. Instead I think about what remains to be done to release this week's podcast episode. It's important that I have it completed before noon. Asia and I, in preparation for our friends' return, have tasks to complete around the house and, if I spend too much time fiddling with the podcast, then cleaning out the refrigerator and taking out the trash will be more stressful than they need to. Before long my mind wanders to the world that awaits me once I unlock my phone. What messages will be there to greet me? Will Trump, if I open Twitter, have invaded Greenland? Might a more intimate horror meet me, a digital landmine waiting patiently for my eyes to fall onto its trap and be maimed by its inevitability?
In this indistinct place before the day begins, a space where all of its possibility gathers, if I managed to just close my eyes again and sleep, my thoughts could melt away into the murky darkness, every last one of them burning up, my awareness losing shape, breaking apart and stretching out in all directions like psychic shrapnel—becoming the bomb.
I open my phone and see a video of the president of the United States talking about a famous mental institution in Queens, where he and I grew up.
Not together, of course.
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