a visual short story

MORNING

The things that haunt my dreams are very small, someone else wearing a favorite shirt of hers or her phone charger on the kitchen counter of our mother’s house, most of the time I wake up not having noticed them, they’re only ever background details. Sometimes it takes me days before I realize that her charger has not been on my mother's kitchen table for a few years, and it's only in my dreams that I've seen it recently.

Zareen’s texts in the morning are my favorite things to wake up to. Most of them are Tumblr links to vines she found while procrastinating the night before and her feelings, poorly spelled, on said links. When I lived at home my sister Ella would always yell at me for not keeping my phone on silent at night, because the buzzing of Zareen’s texts at four in the morning would keep her up. But watching a dog chase around a laser pointer is always a good thing to wake up to, and any meme of drake will be sent to all my other friends. Facebook notifications are rare but I saw the little red circle in the corner of the app and I had to check it. Someone had once again dug up a photo from Ella’s past by commenting on it. It only happens every once and awhile but when it does I can’t help but feel a little anger, probably territorial, though I can’t really blame them, the occasional post on her wall or nostalgic comment on a photo is probably a perfectly healthy way of coping.

But today is one of those days where that post stays with me throughout the morning, and I struggle to keep the thoughts at bay, but the words of that person’s comment trail at the end of my thoughts. My first instinct is to bitch about the comment to Ella. I tried to think of the things I needed to get done during the day. I should probably go get cereal tonight if I was going to eat anything substantial tomorrow morning, I was possibly down to my last bagel. If I didn’t brush my hair I could get away with keeping it in a bun, but it doesn’t look too great with this shirt. I wanted to watch Late Night with Seth Meyers tonight, but that would mean getting only a handful of hours of sleep. Though I knew I would probably watch it anyway until Seth's voice put me to sleep.

I have the thought almost daily that I should probably start my day at a later hour, and while 7am is still a decent hour to make breakfast, it has become increasingly harder to wake up. Living with the same schedule as someone who works a nine to five job is just fine but would make a lot more sense if I had responsibilities earlier than 11am. Ella’s mug remains to be the only clean mug readily available, clean typically counts as a mug that only clear liquids have been in recently. I can hear my phone buzzing somewhere out of sight, which reminds me that I should probably confirm getting lunch with a friend later in the week and answer texts from the day before.