XVI

Last night I fell asleep, again, at three a.m. This would not be such a bad thing if I did not, then, have to wake up at six. I have done this several times over the past week. This is a first in years. There was a time, a decade past, when I would refuse sleep simply because I could. There is a sense of divine thrill in shirking natural duty. But my body has weakened. I can no longer scoff in the face of biology. As my alarm heralded dawn, mere hours after I fell asleep I awoke in that tremor of near-sleep--a median waiting area between the body and the spirit. Not cold, or frightened, but in mild paroxysm. I have had this feeling before, and yet cannot induce it by force. It comes of its own accord. The body twitches, and yet, it doesn't spasm. There is no pain but a sense of the body reawakening anew in the world. Rebuilding itself. I suspect I trembled in a similar matter mere minutes after birth, shocked to fright by the cold air, made flesh manifest for the first time in the open light. I suspect that, minutes and seconds before I die, I will tremble in this same fashion. And, in perhaps this realm alone, I don't fear death. Because, when I awake, trembling in the fashion of the birth/death, there is the sense that I am connected to far more than I can consciously describe, like dream made flesh, as one melting into the sutures of the Universe. And I do not want to let go of it. I cling to the tremors, and yet, as always, cannot. And I find myself wanting to cry. For no particular reason--neither from sadness, depression, guilt nor joy. A cry to mark a time and place, and without explanation. Except, perhaps, that it is six a.m. And it is time to get up for work.