The Big Snooze
Stretching into the new year.
The alarm rings:
A jarring jangle silenced by muscle memory.
I am a giant in the clouds, warm and heavy.
Murky mauve stillness.
A searing flash of light against my eyelids.
In and out.
Mauve moves to blue.
A silhouette floats against the electric glow.
Padded footsteps. The rumble of the kettle. The crackle of the Chemex.
I see, then I hear. Senses are one at a time.
Sound gathers like an orchestra warming up:
Bellowing frogs. Staccato raindrops. The distant crescendo of waves.
An overture welcoming the day.
Zip is a hot coal burrowed at my feet, crawling up to meet the morning.
Imperceptibly, the tide shifts.
All at once, there is more light than dark.
______
The past few mornings I’ve been sleeping in.
I’m typically an early riser, impatient to start the day. But this week I gave in to the gravitational pull of the snooze.
Done right, snoozing is more decadent than chocolate cake. Time stretches into a luxurious expanse of gentle murmurs and dreamscapes. It’s a rare moment in the margins. A liminal time of day nestled within a liminal time of year.
I spent the last few days of 2023 up the coast at Sea Ranch, windows thrown open to the salty air. Between sleeping and waking, I could hear the crumble and crash of the winter swell against the rocks, as relentless as the passage of time. Just as one wave races toward the shore, another is already swallowing it whole, remaking the ocean landscape.
Barbara Kingsolver says she journals to pause the onslaught of time, that writing temporarily pins the rushing river of life to its banks. I feel that same impulse to grasp, hold on, record. I want to bear witness to every wave as it rolls in, thundering along the shore. I want to memorize every tuft of grass on the bluff. I want to inhabit the time-worn angle of the cypress trees, frozen in a permanent expression of shock.
Tonight we’ll go to sleep and wake up to a new year. We can’t stop time. But we can open the windows and listen to the chirping frogs, the insistent rain, the whistling wind. We can linger a little longer in each moment.
And sometimes, we can hit snooze.