The Awakening - (non-sports) Part 1

Day 1

Have you ever been deep in sleep, and awakened suddenly by a sound you haven't the ability to define. It's there on the edge of your consciousness, but remains unsettling by it's resistance to name. You know there was something loud enough, jarring enough to break the thick stream of sleep that held you, but what exactly it was remains cloaked in shadow, a word on the tip of the tongue, but refusing to jump from the lips.

It was with this anxiousness that I awoke this morning. Of course, under the circumstances, you'd think I be adjusting to the abnormal. On a side note, how long does abnormal have to rule before it is transposed to being the norm? Whatever the amount of time, I must be close to striding over it.

In the darkness, foreign walls laid as an unknown canvass, unmapped to my memory, for shadows to dance hand in hand around my swimming perception, still caught by the slurred lines of fading sleep. This was not my home, for I haven’t been there in weeks. It was only shelter from the night, and the thoughts that roam there. I’d entered by night, and found myself abruptly awoken still deep in its embrace. My head played with ideas of horror movies and childhood nightmares passed, cast from the realm of dream into my current reality.

Had they found me? Was there even a “they”? It’d been weeks since I’d seen another living creature. Not so much as a bird came to serenade me as I walked this barren landscape. Still, I found the lack of bodies alarming, to say the least. There had to be a “they”.

Inching, as a snail fearing his complete surroundings to be made of salt, I lifted myself from a bed belonging to one I never met, sheets smelling of someone I’d never known. My shoe gently scraped the bedpost, causing me to recoil. As with most nights, there wasn’t comfort enough to disrobe prior to sleep, allowing me to wake fully dressed.

With my hands feeling the air before me, I crept forward to find only more silent darkness. Through a hallway, a left turn and another short hallway I came to the front door. Unlocked when I’d initially found it, I unlocked it again. As I said, comfort had become hard to come by, even if there didn’t seem to be anyone, or anything to intrude.

The door opened slowly as I pulled to reveal the gray licked light of the moon, which smiled from its sideways slit of a grin, reflecting in the empty world around me. Whatever had made the sound was now gone, or at least hidden. I took two steps outside and decided to press on. Sleep wouldn’t tread where I could catch it again tonight.

I'll put away this small notebook that is to be my only companion, and promise only to return when time allows.