Wake

Sometimes sleep won’t leave the bedding of your brain, and every word rises only to find it self recalled, back to the comfort and curl of darkness. There are new words you long to think but each effort is quickly lulled and tucked under cover of an exhausted narrative. The one that says you’ve tried that before. There’s nothing you can do to change the way it’s always been. The way it always will be. The way things work. The one that says just five more minutes, disregarding all alarm.

The momentary stretch and reach, the fleeting light through your lids, the lifted weight of night – we know what that’s like; that soaring second when it’s entirely true that another life is waiting for you, and you’re heightened and heartened and here!

Where does that go, that fragile stretch of morning light? Can our newborn fist not open? Is our marrow made of ambien? In the raising of the sash, in the flutter of the lash, are we lit with possibility, or blinded by fear, or impossibly weary by what we think we already know?

Wake, now. And if the dream begins to yawn, keep your eyes open just another breath or two. Before you sleep again, say the words you long for.