Observe the Lauren's natural habitat and habit- curled up on a couch, staring off into space...
A stoner-monologue has taken over my thoughts lately (in the planet-earth voice, I think) in a continuous loop. It's the same stupid feeling I've been clinging to for months and I need to let go because honestly, if I don't wake up soon my life will go down the drain.
So here is me... letting it go. I need a shrink, probably, or maybe just a tape-recorder, but as with everything else I should be getting or doing in my life, I’m going to put both of those off some more and think about this instead.
1.
I wake up in the morning and roll over, feeling the heaviness receding from behind my eyes dizzily; I notice that I am blinking for perhaps the only time I will during this whole day. The sunlight pours over the tops of my eyelids and makes me squint; muted where it is reflected off of your hair, the curtains of the window barely drawn open so only one thin, bright beam of light is breaking in. I contemplate simply getting up and pulling it shut, then crawling back over to my spot between you and the wall.
I will turn towards it, the need to be pressed against you fading with the pleasant soreness of the early morning, and adjust the sheet that is pressing into my chin, caught between my face and the pillow. The light pressing against my eyes will be gone and I will be repositioned and maybe even more comfortable than I am right now, the skin on my side not slightly hotter where I am pressed against you and in twenty minutes I will get up and press a kiss to your shoulder and take a shower- I will, in just a moment, as soon as I get up and shut the curtains a little more tightly and stretch my muscles just a little and then settle back down into the bed, letting my thoughts drift and float gently away again for just twenty minutes until I am less dizzy with heaviness of sleep.
The birds started chirping a little bit ago, when I was suddenly vaguely awake to notice that my foot had been uncovered and it was still cold enough that my toes were stiff. I pulled my foot back in and slowly a seal between the cold and I formed; I could feel it settling around me and curling up again into sleep like a cat, like I already am doing. I am happy to feel the cold when I am not cold, and happy to have woken up in the morning when I get to then go back to sleep (conscious of the fact that I can put off consciousness for a few more minutes).
Being happy is noticing all those tiny little feelings in the world that makes you glad it’s there. I wouldn’t have thought that this would be happiness, which is maybe why it took me so long to find it.
Most people, I think, are much better at being alive than they are at imagining things. I want to say that I am better at being alive than at imagining, but I hate using the phrase “I’m better” in any context; there is an inherent pang of guilt, somewhere in the part of my mind that is asleep when I am thinking, even if that is not what I mean. So what I will say is that, happy or not, I am much worse at being alive than I am at imagining.
Go back to sleep with me and I will wake up with you in a few hours, in a few days, in a few years.