Another Cheap Memoir...

Again, I wrote this in my head as I was driving to work at 7:30 AM...

“Today I woke up at sunrise for the second time in the year. If I am up early it means that it was a forced imposition, and it means that I probably went to sleep only 3 hours ago. The only person related to me who enjoys mornings, is my Dad. When I lived with my parents, I would always run into Dad on Sunday mornings, and while I was ready to collapse in bed after returning home from a Saturday night-out, he would just be getting up, looking all fresh while preparing his corn-flakes with the daily news open on the table.

Never in my life have I looked fresh in the mornings. The only times I’ve been awake so early were those in where I had stayed up all night. I used to go out on Saturdays a lot, in Buenos Ayres, and the mornings had a different meaning to me.

Six AM on a Sunday was always the time when pigeons would gather in the exhausted avenue to eat from the crumbs left over from Friday night’s madness. It was the sun that rose out from the asphalt as a crippled child and kept growing over the roofs and stretched from the balconies of orange tinted buildings. Sunday at 6 am was me in my jeans and smelling like cigarette smoke, getting off the public bus that carried me home from the city, and I would be murmuring a poem by Charles Bukowski under my breath that ended with this line: “Yes, some lives were made to be wasted.”

Six AM on a Sunday meant coming in as silently as possible into our apartment, and locking myself up in the kitchen to eat out of last night’s spaghetti leftovers until the hunger that came from smoking too many joints had disappeared. Six AM on a Sunday meant spilling coffee stains on my Dad’s Bible that rested open in the kitchen table, its pages flapping with aimless rustle caused by the wind currents that filtered through the cracked door. Six AM on a Sunday was walking slowly down the hallway so that mom wouldn’t hear me, and grabbing my cat Tito in my arms so that he would stop meowing. Once inside my room, it was opening the closet doors, twice, so that the rusty nails would screech and help me to purposively wake up my sister, just to make her listen to me ramble about my night out.

And this is when I realize how old I’m getting. Because time does crazy things to people: If I am awake in the early hours of the morning now, it’s because of my job and the monotony of a routine, or because of some exam I didn’t study enough for and have to catch up with, or because of laundry. And whenever I do stay up until later than 4 AM for some party, my body feels like it’s been run over by a train the next day. Oh, but who can take away my days. And this, although not as exciting as the past events, this, is my life now; and it’s no worse than the other lives I’ve lived.”