Ache

June 17, 1980

The morning light flickers through the window and I blink.

It comes too quickly; I have just closed my eyes when the sun invades this darkened sky.

This isn’t Christmas Eve; but an unseasonable chill has me under my winter quilt and I feel its soft fabric against my bare skin, so smooth I grow taunt from it.

This night into morning is not like my waiting for the sandman to come as I often have done when young.

Sleep takes me without warning, a mean stalker that shakes me awake again with scalding sun.

I stretch and feel each rib, my stiff joints crack.

I don’t even know what day it is, and vaguely think someone should be shouting for me from downstairs for me to get ready for school.

But there is no downstairs, and the school I am scheduled to go to doesn’t start up again until September, and I must get there myself.

But I am 16 again, filled with all the urges and rages that come together only at this time of day, and I am aching with it.

I want to leap up and run outside, and through some grassy field I must find somewhere nearby, climb some hill, find some maple tree that will accommodate my limbs in its limbs and rock me in its wind.

I feel in the bright light for my abandoned trousers and sneakers and t-shirt.

I smell breakfast, but it is not my breakfast, but the sizzling of bacon from some other apartment in this beehive of cold water flats I live in, but this, too, stirs up only hunger that I cannot satisfy simply by eating, and I hurry out, into the car port, and down the drive, and onto the street, and across the bridge and down along River Drive, feet pounding the ache out of me until I am pumped up with something else, and the sunlight that comes too soon makes me sweat out the ache I wish I could satisfy in another way, heart aching for something else that the miles help ease out of me.