The Mornings

The mornings are not usually a fun time for me. The alarm going off raises feelings that are a mix of annoyance, despair, and apathy. How dare that pesky alarm do what I told it to and wake me up early in the morning!? Why do I have to get up anyway? I don't really want to...I was only joking, alarm clock. Can't I just curl up like a fetus and pretend that I don't hear it? Maybe I'll just ignore it for a while...it's all contingency time: I won't be late if I stay in bed a little bit longer. Right?

Of course, it's not just my alarm clock. Sebastian's phone has the most vicious of alarms to compel him to come out from the tangle of duvet and wife in the morning. I hate that thing. Invariably, long before my own alarm and I start our bargaining routine of "Just another five minutes?", "No. Right now.", Sebastian's alarm lights up pre-emptively. As if a second's warning is enough to compensate for the evil it is about to unleash.

It beeps and screams and buzzes like angry hornets when the vibrator goes off frantically enough that you'd like to think it was going to commit mobile phone suicide and jump off the dresser drawers.

"Just another two inches! I can't take it any more! I'm ending it all

right now! You can't change my mind!"

If only.

Of course, this necessitates that the next split-second sees Sebastian leap from the bed like it's an Olympic sport. A mad grab is made for the offending phone, the stylus unleashed in one fluid motion, and the phone's screen viciously jabbed in an effort to silence it. It's a bit like the scene from Collateral meets the scene from Psycho.

By this point I'm awake...but just awake enough to know that I'm not asleep. My eyes are still opening and closing independent of one another in a way that looks like I might be stoned or otherwise heavily medicated. As I squirm under the covers and bury my head under pillows, it must look like when the uruk-hai are hatched in Lord of the Rings...but less slimy. If I'm lucky, it's a morning where I can go back to sleep, and so the petulant scowl resides and I can have some quasi-semi-coherent conversation with Sebastian before he goes to work.

I used to get up every morning at 5 in high school! Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Mornings and I aren't friends any more.