520 AM
I woke with a man's voice in my head:
"today my session begins"
In the moment before I woke, at 519:59 AM, I knew what that meant.
I'll be teaching a microbiology class on South Seattle Community College campus in the fall. Four days a week, I wake up hours early, drive through morning traffic, across the West Seattle Bridge, dodging big rigs and pokey slowheads through narrow pothole-ridden lanes, so I can sit through two and half hours of the summer section, to be reminded of what I learned almost 20 years ago as a college freshman.
It's Tuesday. Today we'll be talking about the lac operon.
The voice belongs to an ex colleague. In my dream he was writing the narrative for my life. He has been writing me emails in real life. In my dream he was a reliable narrator. In real life his writing contains only a passing relationship to the facts most other people in his world agree on.
I don't remember anything else clearly enough to write it down. It's fading. Receding into the past. I'm not even sure why I bothered to write this down except that I've never woken like that before, with such a clear voice, someone else's voice, getting in the last dream word. It's remarkable.
This morning I'm acutely aware of my mortality. I feel the minutes that tick away my life. I woke and thought, it's been so long since I wrote anything besides an email trying to deal with some new crisis at work. I thought about habits.
For years I would wake on my own and head to the gym with sleep still stuck at the corners of my eyes. These days my tendons hurt when I wake. I'm in physical therapy Tuesday evenings instead of running around after a soccer ball.
My tendons also disapprove of my old habit of social dancing 3-4 nights a week. Instead, I'm watching tv at night, eating my dinner from aluminum trays with the cats' eyes trained on me, waiting for some distraction so they can lick sour cream or gravy from the lid.
I'm using an alarm these days, like I did back in college - and snoozing, pushing the time as far forward as I can and still walk into that 8am class seconds before it begins.
I haven't written in months. I'll be forty in less than a week. I feel old and tired and fat.
I thought about going back to sleep, about the heaviness of my eyes, and the 5am grey rain. I got up and dug out my laptop. I don't have a lot to say but it's a start.
