I woke up to a flood of light coming through the tiny slats in the blinds. It was too painfully bright, even with the blinds being as tightly shut as was possible. There was no going back to sleep, but I stayed in bed anyways. The light was so intense, I became lost in noticing the way it transformed my room into something much more crisp and colorful than usual. The light was uplifting, powerful. I could tell the pace of the flow of clouds outside by the way the light dimmed and brightened, the flood swelled and receded into my square space which was my entire world at the moment. After becoming completely absorbed in the movement of light and shadow outside of my room, I felt a timing with it, as if the heaving and lessening of the light was in unison with the slow and steady beating of my heart. And that’s when I felt it… when I realized how slowly my heart was beating, how I felt no motivation to move and barely enough to breathe… I could feel more than ever how sorrow was a physical burden. It does not just weigh on your mind… keeping you from thinking. It has a physical manifestation, a weight that you can feel in your hand, like a fist sized ball of condensed, concentrated mass. And that heaviness, that single, smooth ball… it sits in the pit of your stomach, making you feel always empty, but with no desire to be full… from there it pulls down your muscles in your shoulders, it makes you hunch over, distorts your spine. It emanates coldness from your core outward, and after a while, its pull on your muscles stops straining them and simply makes them feel limp. You stop fighting against the heaviness, and you willingly let it pull you down… your head stooping so low that you let it go to the floor and curl yourself into a ball around the ball within you… becoming one with the terrible weight of pitiable misery.
The light swelled powerfully, and I felt a mutual dramatic, upheaval within myself. I could throw that heaviness out, I could vomit it out, hurl it from myself, forcibly carve it, cut it out of myself. I didn’t have to live with it; I could be ok if I wanted to… I have power over myself…
I tried to stay with the sweeping mood of the light as long as I could; I tried hard to pretend to not notice the dimming of the light again… I rushed to throw the covers aside and throw myself out of the bed in one movement. I pulled open my top dresser drawer and felt myself sinking already. I was beginning to lose momentum as I had to make the tedious and every day decision of what to wear. I stared at the contents of the drawer for several moments before realizing that there was nothing there that I would wear. I closed it slowly and opened the next. I started to convince myself that what I was doing was pointless… how was I supposed to dress myself if I didn’t know what I was doing? And if I sat down to first decide what I was doing, that moment of randomness would be gone, that mood I felt would have sunken already, the day was already lost, it slid like oil from my cupped hands, leaving an uncomfortable residue behind. I lulled myself into accepting the justification that one action would just destroy the next, and finally I decided to lie back down in bed. After all, I had all the time in the world. Nothing had to be done today. I had enough in the bank for the rent for the next few months still. I could always have my job back when I needed it. There was no need… for anything today.
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