And your brain says, “Get up.”

To which your body replies, “No.”

At which your heart says, “You know you should.”

This causing your subconscious to interject, “But we’re at the best part in the dream!”

Which, in turn, finally prompts your brain to say, “If you don’t get up now, your Dad will come in and get you up.”

You groan, yawn like the Black Hole of Calcutta-

and get out of bed.

You know, it’s not really fair that you always have to get up first just because you’re the eldest. You grumble this and other sillier complaints under your breath as you head all the way downstairs to the only open bathroom. Mom has commandeered the other one for her customary make-up application session of 2 ½ hours. Five minutes later you shiver as you stumble out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, once more splitting a black hole as if you want to swallow everything in sight.

Your Dad is up, and seeing your yawn, tells you to get some coffee. But you already sat down! You groan – sure, you’re sitting on the floor, but you still don’t want to get up. With a million mental creaks that you just wish your bones would make to prove how old you feel, you get up and pour yourself some coffee.

And then you just stand there for fifteen minutes, staring into your swiftly-cooling mug. You know, the dark color of the coffee makes you think of your mouth when you yawn. You lean forward, stretching another cavern, and try to see if you can fit your mouth all the way around the rim of the mug.

You stop yourself two centimeters from success.

“O-K, I need to wake-up,” you mutter, blinking decisively. You turn on one heel and stump down the hall, “Need to write something. That’ll wake me up.”

As you walk away your Dad calls, “After all, if you write something stupid, there’s always the backspace key.”

You smirk wryly. True, true, but you have no intention of writing something that stupid.

Backspace is for misspells.

And now you wonder if you’ve hit it more than the spacebar key.

Probably.

You are so tired.

Glancing up at the word-riddled page before you, you try to make sense of the random blitherings while simultaneously pecking your thoughts into the line below. You glance back down.

And delete the whole garble of letters.

Where did that come from?

Right, what did they say in science? When a black hole swallows matter it also ejects excess.

Which makes your thought the matter

And whatever is on this page the excess.

Bravo, brilliant young writer.

You have woken yourself up

Proved the strength of your intellect

And

That you really need to go back to bed.

“Ha ha, wishful thinking,” the cruel brain chuckles.

You heave a sad sigh

And fall asleep on the keyboard.