Temperatures Will Rise

You know those mornings when winter finally waves its chilly fist in your face and you fumble for the alarm clock, knocking it off the night stand, and decide you’re going to stay under the comfortable embrace of your covers for just a few minutes more and, as you lay there, drifting in between sleep and semi-consciousness, you start to think of all the terrible decisions and sins of omission that have brought you to the sorry point your life is in now and, liberated by the gauzy, borderless unreality that one discovers while barely awake in warm bedclothes, you start chipping away at the years, deleting every bad turn you’ve taken to get the place you’re at, until you realize that you can keep subtracting forever, but the root of the problem is basically your very existence, and now you’re imagining a world in which you were never born, in which, say, your sister came before you and you not at all; you’re not looking at this in a Jimmy Stewart, Wonderful Life kind of way; no, you’re considering how much better the planet is if you had never been a part of it — no one misses you because no one ever knew that you were there in the first place, there is no one you’ve hurt or disappointed, no one you’ve let down or been cruel to… in fact, your absence makes their lives, if not astoundingly superior, a bit more easy and less painful without you having been a part of them. And it’s that very knowledge that is the most comforting fact of all: “If I had never existed, everything would be better.” And as you drift back into that deep and pleasant sleep, luxuriating in the idea of a world which you have never troubled, the fucking alarm goes off again and you’re out of bed shivering to turn it off, resigned to the fact that you’re stuck here no matter what and whatever your intentions are you going to fuck things up for everyone again and again until you’re finally in the ground for good? You know those mornings? Well, don’t get too used to them yet. It’s gonna be close to 70 degrees on Monday, which is crazy. We’ll be sweating through our goddamn sheets. What a world.