It's morning. I know it's morning not from the blazing sunshine slipping through the cracks in the drapes, but from that bursting bladder feeling of having to pee but not wanting to get up. That early morning cotton mouth doesn't help matters much either. I roll my head, pry open those sleep-deprived eyes and gaze up at the stark, monochrome display hovering like some distant, angry god above my headboard. 5:29 it says in its cold, liquid-crystal display eyes. One more hour. Only one more hour of precious sleep until another day comes calling. My bladder calls for attention, my mouth for water, but all I can do is roll back over and hope to fall back to sleep. If I get up now, I'll never get back to sleep, but goddamn do I have to piss. It's the same battle I wage every morning, the same feints, the same ripostes, but it always ends the same way every time, my bladder skewering me on the tip of its rapier, hauling me out of bed, to the bathroom and then finally back to bed where I lie awake until that mechanical god chirps the start of new day. The thought comforts me.
It's too damn early for surprises.
A shower is the first part of the day. Cascading, hot water opens the pores, opens the eyes. Twenty minutes of bliss before breakfast. Briefly, I consider the water I waste while I slump against the wall, blearily lathering my right armpit for the fifth time. The earth, sunken, dry and dead, flashes before my eyes, a world of dust and powdered bones, all the trees withered skeletons, the remnants of humanity lurking in its depths, searching in vain hope for that one last drop of clean water. I consider this, yawning, eyes shut against the shampoo and water. Trees are overrated. I'd rather have my shower.
Breakfast is an english muffin slathered with butter and cream cheese with a cup of hot coffee on the side. Saturated fats, cholesterol, carbohydrates, chemicals, processed cheese, all the things that would gnaw at my mind later in the day barely register. Right now, all I can think is 'muffin good, coffee good.' It's gone in a few bites. I sip my coffee, stare at the television, but I don't really watch it. The Weather Channel. It's going to rain... sometime.
The drive to work is 30 minutes of mind-numbing tedium only made tolerable by the presence of music or NPR. It's too early for NPR. Too early to think. I pick some music. It's hard to keep the drive interesting when you drive it twice a day, ten times a week and... many times a year. I can't be bothered to count that. If it's too early to worry about saturated fats, it's too early to count. Besides, math was never my strong point. I brake, I stop, I accelerate, I curse at all the right times. The distance and time passes. Sometimes the drive seems to stretch on forever, other times it seems as if it's over in a snap. Sometimes I don't remember the drive. That makes me vaguely worried, but I arrived safely, so I guess I didn't miss anything.
Work is... work. I'd explain what I do, but that'd kill the mystique. I like to keep it ephemeral, undefinable, kinda like my understanding of what I actually do. I sit at my computer, check my email, look at my schedule and proceed to shamble through the day. Sometimes something will come up, something not on the schedule. I cherish those moments. I leap on them with glee, like a lion tackling a gazelle in some distant Savannah. I tear into it, flesh ripping, blood dripping, the hot taste of power and death in my jaws, but it's over, the moment gone and I'm back to just the bones. And spreadsheets.
I spend the day like that, doing what I'm supposed to be doing, sometimes wondering what I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes I get up, slip out from my corner office and walk down to the main office, through the warehouse. Sometimes I do this because I need something, most of the times I just want to get up and get away from the screen. If I have a paper in my hands, I look busy, so I usually carry one with me even if it's blank or I'm just going to toss it in the recycle bin. I stop, I chat with my old coworkers in the warehouse. I miss it sometimes. I make more now, but I miss that old job sometimes. It was absolutely brain dead work, but I got to stay on my feet all day and there was always something to talk about. I do this four or five times a day. I look really busy, but I'm just filling up the spaces between tasks. Sometimes I wonder how the hell anyone can get paid for doing this.
The last hour of the day is the worst. I spend it looking at the clock. I look at the things I'm supposed to do. In my mind, all of them take longer than an hour to accomplish, so I do none of them. Out comes my phone. I check my email, surf the internet, check my email again just to make sure that all that spam actually was spam. It was. Delete. Delete. Delete. Read. Delete. Delete. I make one last circuit from my office to the other office. My old boss left early again. I always used to complain about that and say I'd never do that if given half the chance. No, I'd stay the whole day and do my damn job, but now that the moment is upon me, I want to leave early too. Nobody would notice. I'm off in my own corner. I could just slip out and miss the traffic. The thought passes and out comes the phone again. Delete. Delete. Delete. Read.
Usually the last half hour is a furious blitz of activity as all the remaining employees struggle to finish the last of their work before 5 o'clock comes calling. Emails spit out, requests ALL IN CAPS, questions, demands, answers, inquisitions! Now! Now! Now! I do what I can, I make vague promises and half-hearted attempts probably leaving everyone wondering whether I actually did anything for them at all. 4:50. Ten minutes. I fly through a bunch of work that I had relegated to the 'takes an hour to finish' pile. I do most of it in five minutes. I hear my new boss leave and I sigh. Finally. I can't leave before her, have to make myself look like the good little worker bee that I'm not. I wait a minute or two then I start to gather my things and I remember a few of the things that I was putting off until the very end of the day. I curse, out loud since I'm alone in my corner and I rush to finish up those few things. It's 5:15 by the time I finally pull out.
I see there're still a few people in the office, those dedicated few that I always see staying late, working extra, long hours. I wonder about that, what drives them to do that. Are they really that busy that they can't finish everything during that long, 8 to 9 hour day? Or do they just love their jobs that much? I've seen them at work, they don't and I know what they do and they shouldn't be that busy. It's a brief thought before I drive out of the parking lot and into that 30 minute stretch of dull to home.
Dinner is a rum and diet coke with pizza. Saturated fats! Cholesterol! Calories! Carbohydrates! The worries are all washed away by liquor and the taste of delicious, processed cheese. I finish and sit in front of my computer to begin my evening extracurricular activities: reading the internet and streaming Netflix. Oh the glorious life I live. I go to all my favorite sites, check my email again (Delete. Delete. Delete.) and my eyes settle on a topic. "Write a short story about your day." I almost dismiss it. I should be doing some real writing, working on that novel, but I know how that ends; Word opened, documents untouched and keys untapped, a big block of vomitous text staring me in the face, daring me to add to it. I always end up backing down.
No, not this time, I think, the finger of my mind cracking like Spock's eyebrow towards the sky. This time, I'm going to do some damned writing, even if it is just for fun or amusement or lolz or whatever. All the authors I know of say that you should just write, write and write. What better opportunity than this? Something stream-of-consciousness, something from-the-hip, something unplanned, get the juices flowing, that sort of thing. And if it's shit? Then what? The damned critic at the back of my mind beckons. If it sucks? If it's awful? Maybe it'll be so bad that you'll never do it again! No, not that this time, I say again. My pessimistic insecurities won't win out this time! My fingers start slowly, hesitantly tapping out the first few letters of something that was much longer than I originally anticipated.
"It's morning."
Topic: Write a short story about your day. (Read 4340 times)