Waking

Sometimes I am not real.

     I wake up, sun filtering through my window curtains, and I cannot convince myself I am a member of the universe. I cannot touch, I cannot feel, an intense blankness--white and ignorant rather than black and terrifying--billows inside my brain.

I cannot possibly be alive.

     News programs blare vaguely across the room, my alarm shrieks on my headboard, my arm reaches up to silence it, but this cannot be my reality.

    There are noises next door, in the hall, outside where people breathe the fresh air: they cling to lucidity, the privilege of normality they've been afforded.

     Someone in the stairwell is speaking to their mother on the phone and they are laughing.

I cannot be real. My lungs spasm too much, my body aches too much, my mind races too much, waking hurts too much for me to be real.