Alive and Not So Well

No. No, I don’t understand this! Terry groaned upon waking. It was back. That feeling of guilt that she just couldn’t shake. Through the fog of recent sleep, she tried to focus on her familiar surroundings, drinking in the details, as if by doing so she’d find the root cause of the problem. The glass and ceramic boudoir lamp left on all night to keep away the terror of darkness, the fourteen-year-old pink digital clock that still kept near perfect time, the dresser crowded with bottles, jars, earrings and assorted papers; all there, all the same, none of it threatening. And there was her small daughter right next to her, tangled in the pink and yellow comforter.

Terry vaguely remembered the little girl crawling into her bed last night and had an obscure recollection of them talking about something in the small hours after midnight. Could that be it? Could the feeling pressing down on her chest, making her throat dry and her lips tremble be caused by her inefficiency as a mother? Wouldn’t a good mother recall what she had talked about with her own child? What if she had said she didn’t feel good and Terry couldn’t remember? She held her hand above her angel girl's mouth to feel the in and out light wind of breathing. She was fine. Her forehead and cheeks were slightly warm, but that was normal considering she was sleeping under heavy covers.

She turned and stared at the red numbers on the clock until they made sense. A little after five. Too early. Maybe that was it. She was up too early and cheating her body of much needed sleep. But for the entire span of Terry’s thirty years, she had always been the first one up, the first one to open the curtains and wait for the new day. She hadn’t missed very many sunrises over the years and each one filled her heart with joy at the prospect of the endless possibilities that the day might hold for her.

Unfortunately, most of those promising days ended with no changes for the better, other than the obvious occurence that one more day had ended and so she was that much closer to the end of her uneventful life. For reasons she didn't care to analyze, it was a comforting thought.

Some mornings, the pervading guilt was barely existent. It was there, but felt minor enough that Terry could shake the thought off as easily as she shook out her hair after taking a brush to her long blond tangles. Most mornings were not so blessedly simple. Most mornings passed as this one did, with a feeling of doom and dread hanging over her head like a storm cloud in the sky, threatening to rain down on her, but not knowing when it would happen.

Perhaps it was because she was so unhealthy. Often, cigarettes took the place of food and Terry vaguely prided herself on being so careful with money at the same time she berated herself for the dirtiness and unhealthiness of smoking, not to mention the bad example she was setting for her child. Perhaps she was even the cause of her daughter's ear problems and no amount of hanging her head out of a window or blowing smoke directly into the air-intake above the stove was enough to discourage the damage Terry was probably doing.

Every morning, as faithfully as she watched the sunrise and drank deeply from a cup of strong coffee, the guilt came. And every morning, she would search for the root cause of it, knowing she would never find it because it wasn’t one thing. It was all things. It was every decision she made, every thought she had, and every breath she took that caused the guilt. While every day brought the promise of less time on this earth, each day brought an increase in the guilt of having lived her life wrongly. She was alive without meaning and hadn’t yet learned to forgive herself for that. The only thing left for her to do this morning was wait for the sunrise and lay her hope upon it that her life would likewise shine. Her optimism would be reborn, follow the sun, and fade into the horizon waiting for tomorrow's rebirth.