Your day started with you sitting right up in your bed before even opening your eyes. When you did, they were crying. The dream that had been playing in your theater mind included holding someone that you used to love. The robot circuits inside the computer part of your mind, the ones that protect the theater part of your brain, were still glowing from the images that had been projected onto that screen that makes up your dreams.

The time between you opening up your eyes and the time between you mentally waking up was: 00:12 minutes. Somewhere in there, you buried the emotional part of your body. The shower you were standing under shortly after becoming a bi-pedal being again was the only reason you got out of bed in the first place. With your face under the hot steam, all you could think about was what it would feel like to be a clam, at the bottom of the ocean, with no brain at all. Alas, you had a brain in your skull.

With that thought lingering like the scent of the sandalwood candle you had lit before stripping down, you stepped out and began your morning ritual. You never thought about what you did during your shave, exfoliant, cleanser, lotion, two q-tips, floss, brush, gargle of hydrogen peroxide and swish routine until something out of the ordinary caught your eye. It had caught your eye about two months before, as well, right about when you stepped out of the shower and accidentally saw yourself in the mirror.

It was a globe. A tire. The result of six packs instead of being a six pack itself. 

The belly had grown under the previously watchful eye of the child you were in your 20’s. That blissful decade in which you never thought about death and believed in believing itself because you had no reason not to believe. You relaxed your chest and watched your middle settle into the results of working extra hours with your brain and not your body. Thinking about things like loan rates and passive income had created some extra weight that you never experienced until the bio clock ticked carelessly past the thirty mark without so much as an okay from your previously careless twenty-year-old self.

You waltzed, boxer clad, back into the one room that made up your studio apartment in the big dirty city that some call home and started to prepare your eggs. The sun beamed relentlessly into the obscenely large, industrial style windows that stretched the entirety of your seven hundred square feet of existence space. It was quite a lot for your geographical location and, most importantly, a lot compared to what your particular peers could afford at the time. You had a whole system for how you prepped, flipped, seasoned, and ate your eggs. It was just another thing you never had to think about because of the system you had put into place. That system created space in your mind, and you loved the silence when you could get it. 

You washed each dish you had used and got your yoga mat out. After carefully placing your pill shaped speaker on the red brick ledge beneath one of the windows, which you kept open, you picked a song that you guessed would make you happy and started with cat cow. The windows had to be open because you were burning jasmine incense and you didn’t want the fire alarm going off again. An alarm to tell you when the box you were living and dying inside of is burning down was not something you technically signed up for in the first place.

You push through your push-ups and try not to burp egg during your burpees before concluding your five minute warm up routine to tackle your day like the champ you were told that you are. A day you will spend entirely inside of your apartment, alone. The sounds of the busy city below waft into your ears right before you place your $1340 noise canceling headphones with built in bluetooth connectivity and swappable microphone over your ears. 

Everything was numbers numbers business business for you when it came to going to work. You hoped that particular mindset hadn’t accidentally bled into your friendships and private life. But then you remembered that you sacrificed your friends and private life for the life you had made for yourself now. A life of grind. A life of survival. A life of doing for the sake of doing, just to show that you could do it. You clicked on your laptop and got patched into the cross conference quarterly call you had been deliberately late to for exactly the last thirteen minutes. Thirteen minutes of feeling sorry for yourself.

You announce yourself but you don’t apologize. The game is afoot. You live for the game. The game is who can pull more fake money from the air before someone else pulls more fake money from the air than you. Real head to head stuff.

You spend the next hour and half talking to new executives with new teams about what they should expect from the drones on the bottom now that they have graduated to the corpo realm. You don’t say that, of course, but you know how to get the message across. You use words like “turnkey solutions” instead of saying “zero work for massive returns”. You suggest “a return to our original mission statement” even though you and everyone on the call knows the company only came out with the mission statement regarding protecting the planet and its resources three months ago. Everyone plays along with the charade, just like they should.

You’re not big brother. You’re barely big business. But, you’re enough and you know it. You continue to self soothe and justify some decision that was made for you years before you even knew there was a decision to be made. Now you’re stuck with not just playing a role in a meat grinder you don’t believe in, but you now have to deal with the fact that you know you are choosing to participate in playing a role in a meat grinder that you don’t believe in.

Yet, you must continue to eat and not die from mother nature.

So there you are. The army of small succulents on every square inch of shelf space that you have inside your box get special attention as you continue to be the voice of reason in an unreasonable world as you speak into your headset. You never will figure out why they are listening to you, but you would never question it. 

In the 2:05 hours and minutes left before you can take a “1 hour lunch” but in reality it will be the 2:30 worth of hours before you can just let everything and everybody absolutely drop out of the space that is your mindscape. You know what waits for you during “lunch hour” and it is staring up at the sky surrounded by kale and imagining exactly what it is like to be nothing at all. A speck. A light with two orbs of nothing floating above the fucking cosmos with nothing of importance to speak into the happenings of the humans below you.

But you can’t be that until another 1:59 worth of hours has passed.

You talk to several other people on the other side of the line. Lowlifes. Nobody’s. People of non-importance. Investors, some called them.

People with money who you didn’t think should have the money. That’s how you had to think of them. If you don’t think of them that way, then you wouldn’t be asking them for their money. 

You had a better deal for them. You were their next big idea. You were going to save them from the boredom of not knowing what to do with their money. 

The beauty of your approach was that you believed the words that were coming out of your mouth. The “truth” behind your basic conjectures regarding what you thought might be the futures of your prospective – clients – were simply one human conjecturing about what could be for no other reason than the past. But nobody knew the future. You were starting to understand that nobody really knew the past. You hadn’t lived in the present for years by then.

You got caught staring into the sunbeam coming through one of your expensive windows in between calls and started absently mindedly thumbing the little silver pen between your well lotioned thumb and equally lotioned forefinger. Your mindhole started remembering the last time you lived in the moment.

Being present to the moment was something you had been taught in overly stuffed personal development weekends inside of strangely sterile rooms filled with other desperate strangers. Everyone was looking for meaning to make themselves look good. 

They thought that would make them feel good. Everyone talked about seeing. The kind of seeing that made them convicted that living in the moment was what was going to buy them eternal happiness. 

The answer. The key. 

You would check in on them later at the next personal development special weekend. Maybe this time in Bali. Somewhere with catering, hopefully.

Your brainhole started reviewing, like a ghost from another time, the first and last time you truly lived in the moment. That last moment you were alive. That last moment you simply were for the sake of wereing and that was all. You hated your mind for showing you that in the flash of a second, but you were powerless to stop it.

It was an age ago. You were somewhere else. You weren’t clean and you weren’t in your perfect apartment in the big city. 

You were a wild thing. A creature of the woods. A traveler on a journey who had somehow made his way deep into the forest beside a lake. It was like a jungle, but one of those jungles they keep in the pacific northwest of the continent. It was the middle of the night and the fires from a party that  had lasted three days by then were cutting little slits into all of the darkness of the forest around you. You saw the moon. That was the moment that you let out your last fake breath. You were real and then you were gone.

Then you had to take a breath. You tried to remember what your yoga teacher taught you. Then you checked the clock. Your mistake. 

There are :59 worth of life hours left before your apartment top nature treatment to help keep you grounded. The voice in your head had never been clearer about narrating your experience of existence for absolutely no one, for no reason at all. You take another breath, and suddenly you’re back to talking with the Late But Not So Great Mrs. Beatrix Smith.

You always knew how to hook the vulnerable ones. It wasn’t because her name was Beatrix and you knew that meant she was old. It wasn’t because her last name was Smith, either, but that still managed to play a role in your eventual mental victory over Mrs. Beatrix Smith.

It was a victory you felt you deserved. A victory you undoubtedly believe you deserve. It led to such a lovely time for you up on the roof. It teed you up for a nice send off.

Stretching out onto the yoga mat you brought with you up to the roof of your apartment, your skin soaks in the afternoon sun. You shut your eyes for the beginning of your extended lunch and the bright red light quickly gives way to a darkened sleep. There’s a deep part of you that just wants to stay on the wooden deck surrounded by plants you kept and tended to up there as well.

Forever if you are lucky.

Then you woke up and you were who you thought you always were. A robot sitting in a cell to act as a battery in a bigger machine. 

Then you blinked again.

Then you woke up and you were a barbarian. A viking. A wild creature of the woods. The cold air rushed into your lungs before you forced it out and were alarmed to find blood in your spit. Looking to your side, it appeared you had survived an axe wound. Not the fun kind.

Then you blinked.

Then you woke up and you were an androgynous captain of your own ship. You were nameless and you were sexless and you were happy. 

You opened your eyes. 

And it was 00:10 life hours before you would need to finish the last half of your workday.

You needed to be ready to work, but you wanted to be ready to live. You had to leave the sun and the wood and the plants. You needed to be in place for the next rotation. Your presence is requested on the phone, Mr. Harrison. Are you there, Mr. Harrison? Are you ready to be human again, Mr. Harrison? 

As your mind wandered again while making your way back down the stairway to your apartment, you wondered if any other creature on this Earth suffers from the burden of the concept of identity. You thought of how much of a loss it is for a creature to be gifted with the sense of identity, only to have all of that creature’s energy go into trying to define that sense of identity. You thought of clocks built to never know what time it is.

Then you went to work. Still unsure if consciousness was a gift or a curse. Then you realized that it didn’t really matter.