I got up this morning to the blast of my alarm clock. 5 a.m. came like a thousand daggers into my mind. Piercing, piercing. I flop out of bed – there’s no need to worry about disturbing anyone. When I get up, all that’s left is a crumpled white sheet and a pile of blankets that look like a small igloo.

I don’t make the bed. There’s no use, no point.

I flip on the recessed lights that dot the bedroom ceiling and shuffle into the bathroom. The light oozes in and I stand there, my hands pressed tightly against the sink, as I lean toward the mirror. I can barely see my face, but I know it’s there. Glued against the image of myself, I have a conversation with my face. We talk for several minutes, but nothing really gets said. It’s hard to talk to someone you barely know.

I turn on the light. It bounces off the white walls and clear plastic shower curtain and straight into my eyes, and I’m blinded for a moment. I splash some water on my face, shake a can of Aloe Vera Barbasol and dispense a large puff ball of shaving cream into my hand. And as I frame my face with it, I’m taken back decades, to a time when my father and I would share the bathroom at our tiny home on Detroit’s west side before he would go to work and I to school. He’d take the cream he didn’t use on his face and paint mine with it, the last bit he’d dab on the tip of my tiny nose and I’d laugh. I remember the scraping sound his razor made as it tore off his whiskers and how the first lines it made on his freshly creamed face looked so perfect. I felt so proud I got goose bumps on my tiny arms.

I shave in exactly 23 strokes. Six for each cheek, seven for the neck and two to clean-up my sideburns, a stroke where I pull up the skin toward the side of my face to tighten the skin, making my wrinkles disappear. I’m taken back to my father’s bathroom again, and my eyes water for the thought of it. But I wash away the tears as I rinse my face. They disappear down the drain with the creamy, whisker-speckled water.

The light shines on my head as I comb my hair back and I can see the shininess of the oil on my scalp. I’m not bald, but I will be.

I dress. Nothing fancy. Baby blue button down shirt, paisley tie, all hugged with a black suit. I slip on a pair of thin black socks and place my feet into my worn black shoes and it feels good, like I’m not wearing any shoes at all, like the hot summer evenings when I shot hoops in my driveway as a child, nicking the soles of my feet on the cracked cement driveway but loving the touch of the soft dandelions that poked out of them, drifting over my feet like a brand new paintbrush.

I walk out of my bedroom and into the large expanse of my home, a ranch in a quiet neighborhood. The click of my shoes against the hardwood floor bounces off the walls like drumsticks on a snare drum. There are no pictures, no relics or memorabilia. The walls are as flat as flat can be. There’s no cushion to them. I like it that way because I like things hard, sharp, devoid of nostalgia.

The early morning light is just now making its way through a large bay window in the dining area just off the kitchen. The milkiness is cutting through the phalanx of trees in the backyard and I walk over to the window and look out. The light is thick and almost intimidating, as if it was trying to envelop me like a huge white blood cell.

I grab the keys to my car off the kitchen counter and head for the garage. There is no particular scent to my car, as is the case in most people’s because they become a second home for most. My car is pristine, almost like I just drove it off the lot. The passenger and back seats are hard. No one’s ever sat in them.

When I open the passenger door to place my briefcase on the seat, I get an image of a child, about 7 years old, with moppy blonde hair. He’s standing next to me, playing with a backpack. I’m taking him to school and we’re late.

“C’mon, sport, this is the third time this week!,” I say out loud. I want to be angry, but he’s got my blue eyes and he melts me when I look at him. I take my hand and place it on top of his head, running my fingers through his long, thick hair, curling it around his ears so I can get a better look at him.

“When I pick you up this afternoon, we’re gonna go to the Y and play one-on-one, ok?” I say out loud.

“But dad, you’re a thousand feet tall,” I say out loud.

Then I wake from the moment at the ridiculousness of me, petting the air, being warm to the stillness of this garage phantom I created. I start to cry, but can’t bawl – even though my insides are screaming to – because my neighbor and I leave for work at the same time. I stand there, steadying myself against my spotless car, silently shrieking.

I wipe my eyes with an old Kleenex in my pocket and gather myself with a scowl. Pulling the car out of my driveway and heading down the street, I make a wrong turn toward the elementary school just down the road.

I slow the car down as I ease it to the side of the road, throw it into park and run my hand over the hard, cold seat to my right. It should be so much warmer. But then I pull my hand away quickly, like I had just been startled, and wrap it tightly around the steering wheel, twisting it until I hear the leather squeak.

I’ve just been awoken by the needley poke of tiny snowflakes bouncing off the other side of the window in my room. It’s still dark outside and the moon is playing hide-and-seek with the dark snow clouds that are moving across the sky like cars on a freeway.
I lay here and stare at the ceiling for a moment. I know all the specks in it, and I think of all the figures and objects I’ve crafted in my mind from the formations of lines and dots on the soft white tiles. I stare for a long time, longer than usual.
I close my eyes and try to fall back asleep. Sleep is a refuge to me, a temporary reprieve from my life chained to this bed, my hands and feet tied to it with tubes and wires. My body is my prison, but this bed is my torture. I want to arise like Lazarus and tear these strings off my body. I want to feel the pain as they ease out of me. I want to scan my skin and see the blood ooze out of the holes where they’d once been. I want to feel my body again and peer into a mirror, fix my hair up, curl my eyelashes, let a puffy brush tickle my cheeks and powder my face ever so gently.
A shot of moonlight pierces through the window and into my left eye. I want to grab it and feel its brightness. I want to wrap it around my body and wear it. I want to believe that it can take me someplace else. I look down at my right hand, twisted and deformed like a crab claw. I inspect my nails. They’re long and yellowed, with bits of gummy particles under them that no one cares to remove. It disgusts them. They won’t let me grab onto anything except one day at a time.
I take my good hand and move it slowly to the crown of my head, gently tracing the tiny strands of hair that poke out of my scalp, covered in crusty scabs and sores. They’re crooked and dry, like thin, mangled wires, spread far from each other from my monthly dose of chemical cocktails. I open my eyes and begin to dream in the moonlight. I’m with Bobby Trumbull in his ’66 Chevy Camaro, on the beach at Burt Lake, just a mile from the farmhouse. His uneasy hands are caressing my face and I can feel the calluses on his palms. Then he moves his hands up to my hair and they disappear in its thickness. He takes a few large clumps of hair and frames my face with them. He tells me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
The moon is going away now, shifting over the building and out of site, leaving behind a milky light on a perfect slathering of snow that clings to the tree branches and lies silently on the rolling hills outside.