i wake because the body has accepted the terms & conditions again,
because somewhere behind my eyes a small exhausted moderator has reviewed the footage
and removed the parts containing fire, God, my mother crying in a room that never existed,
the black ocean standing upright at the edge of the bed,
the notification that said you have been here before
from an account with my face and no followers.
morning arrives with excellent branding.
blue light. coffee. password. weather.
the little cloud icon claiming partly cloudy
as if the atmosphere has not been screaming all night
in a language my skull automatically marks as spam.
i open my phone before my eyes have fully agreed to be human.
three people are getting married,
two governments are apologizing for something they will continue doing,
a guy i knew in college posts grateful for this journey,
and beneath his sentence the universe is deleting files.
maybe waking is just recovery mode.
maybe sleep is where the full-resolution world loads—
the one with too many colors for the optic nerve,
the one where every object remembers every hand that touched it,
where the dead stand patiently inside their names,
where shame has weather, where desire leaves fingerprints on glass,
where the moon is not “the moon” but an enormous white animal
pressing its blind face against the roof of consciousness.
then morning compresses everything to something playable.
.jpg heaven.
.mp3 grief.
low-bandwidth childhood.
i get dressed.
this seems important.
i pull a shirt over the animal facts of my body,
button myself into consensus reality,
put shoes on the feet that spent all night running through cities
whose streets were made from sentences i almost understood.
outside, the buses kneel at the curb.
the traffic lights perform their tiny red religions.
people carry iced coffee, tote bags, office badges, private catastrophes.
we look incredible pretending the visible world is sufficient.
America, or whatever server this is, keeps timing out.
a man on the train is watching a video without headphones
where someone explains five signs your life is about to change.
the fifth sign is apparently “you feel different lately.”
i want to ask him if last night he also saw the enormous machine under reality
turning slowly, slowly, greased with every forgotten birthday,
every animal killed beside a highway, every message typed and erased,
every version of ourselves we abandoned because rent was due.
instead i say excuse me.
he moves his knee.
the doors open.
the doors close.
this is civilization.
by noon i almost believe it.
i answer emails with phrases like sounds good and circling back,
sacred bureaucratic syllables protecting the village from revelation.
i eat something from plastic.
i laugh at a meme about wanting to disappear.
everyone likes it.
what if consciousness is not a window but a content filter.
what if déjà vu is the system briefly failing.
what if the reason certain songs make us cry for no identifiable reason
is that something behind the curtain recognizes its own password.
once, washing a spoon, i became absolutely certain
that the kitchen had existed for ten thousand years without me
and would continue for ten thousand years after,
the faucet pouring one continuous silver sentence
through every apartment i had ever lived in,
and for half a second i remembered—
no.
the spoon fell.
the mind restored the previous version.
thank you for your patience.
at night i lie down beside the charger,
two mammals returning themselves to electricity.
the room goes dark
except for the router blinking green in the corner,
that tiny mechanical bodhisattva,
sending invisible instructions through drywall, blood, dream.
i close my eyes.
somewhere the moderator removes its gloves.
somewhere the censored world begins uploading.
and if morning comes
i will call it morning.
i will drink coffee.
i will check my messages.
i will say i slept okay.
i will accept the edited footage.
i will carry the bright little lie of waking
carefully,
like a phone with a cracked screen
still warm
from whatever tried to call.