105.7/90.9 (fiction)

You wake up before the alarm goes off, not because you’re excited to go to your job (which is indefinable except to say that it’s totally irrelevant and absolutely conjured up out of thin air and there are lots of manuals documenting what to do and when), but because you suffer from pre-dawn wakefulness, and once you emerge from the depths of unconsciousness you can’t seem to stop thinking about such interesting things as: your weight; your mortgage; when your husband ceased to find you sexually attractive; and that movie you’ve got to return so you don’t incur a late charge at the video store that you’ve been going to for fifteen fucking years and you think maybe they’d cut you some slack from time to time (plus the movie was such utter, banal drivel that you’d like the entire rental fee back since that’s two hours of your life that you’re never going to recover).
You drank too much last night so you have a headache and dry mouth and you’re tired and you almost exit the shower before rinsing the conditioner out of your hair. You’re running precariously low on clean underwear you note, pawing through the top drawer of your bureau, and then you remember you did a load of laundry last night, but forgot to hang it out to dry so everything is nicely cold and damp and hopeless wrinkled and you momentarily contemplate hanging it up and then think, no, it’s really not something I want to do at 7:25am, so I’m just not going to do it.
Sitting at the counter you eat your toast and re-read the same paragraph of the Vanity Fair article about the utter annihilation of the Iceland economy that you’ve been trying to get through for an embarrassing length of time, all the while listening to a weird buzzing noise which is punctuated by rapid hammering and you discern that some neighbor in the general vicinity is doing some kind of home repair at 7:30 in the morning and you resolve that if they engage in such antics any earlier than 10am on the weekend, you will beat them to death with that goddamn stupid Swiffer you bought because at one time you had cable and it seemed like a good idea to buy a Swiffer.
Driving into work you listen to an alternative radio station and actually start to enjoy yourself and are thankful that there are people out there that are creating something other than reality TV shows, and don’t go on strike to resist salary caps, and there isn’t any propaganda or bias associated with what it is that they’re selling, which is essentially themselves, and you’re pretty sure they are writing their own lyrics and playing their own instruments and they’re not going to be selling out GM Place, but they might be at the Orpheum, but regardless, you should really keep a pen and paper handy in the car to write down some of these artist’s names so you can download some of their music (legally, because you do want them to get paid).
Work is work. What can one say? You resist it too much. You have spreadsheets that calculate how much more you need to retire, how many more years you’ll have to work. You don’t need much: you’re not a fussy person. You don’t have grand plans for elaborate cruises or five star hotels. In fact, it looks like you’ll be burning through your nest egg when you’re in your mid-eighties, so you’re kind of hoping you’ll be dead by then, or so totally senile that you won’t know if you’re lapping it up in luxury on some Cunard ship, or if you’re being mistreated in some hovel of an old age home.
The last hour of the day seems like two days. You have visions of standing up, thrusting your keyboard away from you and declaring that you can’t stand another goddamn minute of this and walking out. And then you remember that everyone else is in the same boat and you’re nothing special. In fact, like that guy that your father used to work with at the elevator company that was in his fifties and had a family and a mortgage: when the boss says jump, these people have to jump. You? Maybe not so much. You push away the feelings of futility and pity that wash over you and spent five minutes getting a cup of coffee in the lunch room because that’s five less minutes that you’ll have to spend re-routing expense claims that haven’t been signed off on.
You suck it up. You wrap it up. You get back in the car and now you’re listening to that French jazz station and you’re returning home and the traffic is good and the music is the kind of music that makes you think I just want to spend a day sitting on my deck listening to this music and reading a book and just savoring how excellent these simplistic endeavors can be and the light is hitting the hills in a way that makes it look like something out of a fairy tale and, to quote a line from that book “the gulls hang crying in the sky” and it’s that moment of clarity and beauty and warmth and no one is jumping off the bridge and no one is beeping and the masses of trees carpeting the hills are so clearly delineated and the salty scent of the ocean is wafting in through your windows and you can hear the raucous caws of the crows heading home to roost.
And your phone rings and you’re surprised. You answer it and… and what is it you want? You’ve been through this a million times before. You’re tired and yet once there was something and are you entirely ready to let that something go? Part of you wants him to ask for forgiveness in that desperate, urgent tone that he used the first time, when you believed him, when he cried and told you he loved you and how sorry he was and you were shaken by his atypical outpouring of emotion and you allowed yourself to believe that it had been a mistake and not the symptom of a larger problem. And another part of you wants to just keep on driving and listening to the music and feeling the wind ruffling your hair, the coolness of the car as you cast your arm out the window, your fingertips, your palm, buffeted by the forceful rush of air.