IN THE MORNING WHEN I WAKE UP, OH I KNOW I'M GONNA BE

Mornings are hard. Nights are difficult, too, but with nights there is no abruptness - there are enough diversions to keep your restless mind from seizing in fits. Nights can be extended, stretched thin, teased into gossamer and webs. You have your books, the Trinity Broadcastng Network, and sleeping pills. Nights are nights. But mornings are hell.

Waking up with a half-hour left until your alarm goes off and the emptiness in your bed is palpable to the point of painful. Sleeping with another person is not something that happens often, or a situation you've become accustomed to. In your life, the longest consistent stretch of time another person has granted you that pleasure was maybe two months, maybe less. And even then, most of it was spent hiking, sleeping in tents, hostels, couches; for three weeks your twin-sized mattress in a shared room in a city in a different country.

It is during those endless minutes in the morning that you wish the God you knew when you were younger would come back. A lapping comfort of platitudes and a directive to look ahead, not to the past. But you lost that God you knew and in His absence you filled your mind with worry and doubt. So you take more sleeping pills. Stumble down and push to find the point that will not push back. Get lost in the city where all the faces are familiar but none are family. Test yourself. Go to work and come home and try not to think that the next day you will wake up early and stare at your watch and try to catch the light, sneaking through the blinds, move effortlessly across your wall. How looking at the pattern of bars and spaces reminds you of looking at bars and spaces with a head that is not yours resting on your shoulder.