Waking Up

Waking up is something I’ve always had mixed feelings about.
I find the process itself to be so naturally unnatural.
Going from unconscious to conscious
being reminded of existence over and over again.
On any given morning, it happens in about a four second sequence including the following:
awake, aware, open eyes, long blink, short blink, check the time

But sometimes I wake up differently,
more suddenly, and with a single thought,
very clear and concise, like I’ve been repeating it in my head for hours,
it is the only thing on my mind, nothing else to crowd it.

In the aware stage, before I’ve even opened my eyes,
I’m staring the words in the face so hard they seem familiar and foreign at the same time.
Like when you read a word over and over again for too long until it seems like just a jumble of letters without meaning.

The statement seems so simple but holds so much weight,
as if it were an answer to a question,
but the problem is I can never remember the question.
The more awake I become, the farther I am from finding the question
and the more normal the statement seems to become.
I write the statement down to try to remember

“because you wanted to”

I stare at it, so normal by this point.
Then I wonder,
what was I trying to justify to myself?
What could I have been so unsure about that these four words would make the overlap from asleep to awake

perhaps I’ll never know
or maybe a month from now I’ll wake up with the question
and then put all the pieces together.
That would be interesting.