The Weight of Ordinary Days
The alarm was set for 6:15, but I woke at 5:58, the way I always did, as if my body had learned to distrust the extra seventeen minutes of peace and wanted to get ahead of them before they could be taken away. I lay there in the gray dark and listened to the radiator tick, and somewhere below the ticking I could feel the day already waiting for me, patient as a debt collector, with nothing new in its hands.
I got up before the alarm could go off. I always did. There was a strange, hollow pride in beating it, in denying it the satisfaction of waking me, though I could never explain to anyone why that mattered, or admit that it mattered at all.
The apartment was cold in that particular way that had nothing to do with temperature. Everything in it was clean and squared away — the couch cushions plumped, the remote control aligned with the edge of the coffee table, no dishes in the sink because I never let them sit overnight. It looked, if you walked in as a stranger, like the home of someone who had his life together. That was the joke of it. I had built a life that photographed well and felt like nothing at all, like a hotel room rented long-term, tidy because no one was really…