The Hole

Morning came too early on this October Monday.  I'd love to be the kind of person who bounces out of bed, ready to meet the day, tossing smiles.  I do not.  It takes time to slowly warm to the idea of being awake.  I prefer the world of my dreams.

Just the other night, I dreamed a full-length feature film.  Alone, I sit in a dark theater watching a story about complete strangers unfold.  The twist at the end of the story comes as a complete surprise.  This morning, I remembered my dream and begin to tell my son the story at breakfast.  My husband  keeps breaking in with morning instructions for our son.  I push reality back. My husband swirls in the center of it.  He is a busy dust cloud of industry.  My oatmeal gets cold.

Still, I manage to leave for work five minutes early.  There is road work along the way.  Recently, people in neon-orange vests created a crater in 2 lanes of a 4-lane road.  The neon vests stand above their creation and stare into the absence their hole has created.  Their movements take on the appearance of ritual observance, a primitive pause.  Man stares into the unknown.  They lean on their shovels in reverence.

I make my way past the hole and arrive at school.  Sleepy students shuffle along the sidewalk.  All wear  morning faces just like mine.  I carry my Spongebob lunch bag to the teachers lounge refrigerator.  The shelves are almost bare.  Spongebob becomes a minnow in the belly of a whale.  The refrigerator's light shines too brightly.  It burns my eyes.  I hurry to shut the door.  The warmth of my bed and my dreams beckons still.  I want to lie within them now.

"Not an option," my inner parent squawks and then goes back to sleep. I shuffle among my fellow students of shuffling.  Age does not separate us.  We are a giant grey blob of sleepy confusion.  A shaft of morning sunlight threatens to separate us.  We huddle together for protection.  There is safety in numbers.

Across my older, tired brain, a worry flashes.  "Did I remember my lunch?"  For a second, I am not sure.  Suddenly, the tape replays.  I am placing my lunch into the too bright frig. My entire body sighs in relief.    Lunch is that important.

I lean against the brick wall outside a Freshman math class.  How the numbers used to swim before me.  They taunted my math anxiety with their foreign shapes.  As the students slowly trickle in to class, they carry none of the tension that math used to ignite in me.  Apathy drips off these faces, like grains of sleep fall from morning eyes.  I fight to be free of their contagious mood.  Trying to understand even when the attempt is futile, is better than not caring at all.  The door opens.  I smile a hello to the teacher.  Am I really awake on an October Monday morning or is this still part of a lazy dream slowly meandering nowhere?


I think again of the hole in the road.  I wonder why I should think of this but find no answers.  In my mind, I see the neon-clad work crew holding stop and slow paddles, leaning on shovels, placing traffic cones.  "Avoid the chasm," they seemed to say.  All the while, they stare down into the hole, looking into the darkness, nothing bounded by something.  Each defines the other.  There was a hole in the road today.  I drove around it.