I'm never surprised, but I'll always lay in shock in the moments after an ending conversation and a carrying meaning suppressed behind something softly said to cover up the fact that my face is screaming, twisted up and mutilated in the lack of gentle lamplight... like a painted figure seeming uncomfortably shifted. If so many things fail to take me off guard, then what the hell was I guarding in the first place? I am five feet, six inches tall. Perhaps slightly more on a good day, but the definition for such simple meanings forever shifts in denial, and it's either certain or it isn't.
     So it seems it never is.


      Some days, I wake up forever-early in the morning after an entire evening of uncomfortably rolling around in a dreamless haze, and realize it's only a half-hour before I'm expected to be at a place. Without an alarm to wake me, I stare at my cell phone for chunks of thirty seconds at a time and contemplate how cold it's going to be when I throw the sweat-touched covers back away from me and work my life into the existing hollow of the real world. Unfortunately, though you sometimes wake up on-time, you don't always wake up in enough time.