She wake up in a bed. It could be her bed or maybe it belongs to someone else. It doesn't really matter if she opens her eyes alone and shivering, or if she's sweating because of her close proximity to the warm body that still asleep next to her.

She just lay there with her eyes partially open. Her world is just a blur of soft focus and too fucking bright. It doesn't matter how dark the room is, it just always feels a notch too bright. She made it through the night, she's about to face another day.

She sigh, and it's hard to tell if she's relieved or disappointed. It's more like a mixture of both.

So, she coax herself to consciousness, trying to be mindful of all the things that need to get done today. All of those urgent, but not necessarily critical tasks that she has been shuffling from one to do list to the next. She try to bribe herself awake with the intention of breakfast. She try to guilt herself with the notion of responsibility and the undeniable fact that for all of her indulgent bullshit and irrational fears, she's still qualify as a functional human being.

She laugh and it's hard to tell if its amusement or bitterness. It's definitely a mixture of both.

Maybe her physical just lay there for a while longer, or perhaps she's actually shuffle away from the bed. Either way, she is too awake to go back to sleep; she is too asleep to be awake. She pull her laptop over, or sit down in front of her monitor and nudge the machine to bring it to life, because it makes her feels like she has a life, or at least something like it.

This is how mornings come and go. Trying to quite the sulky little voice in the back of her head that keep asking annoying question like: What the fuck am I doing? Don't you know that this is wrong? Why are you doing this? Why bother?

She try to drown that pushy little voice that keeps mumbling in her ear, with the sound of keystrokes and mouse clicks. She try to tell herself that: You are content with your life, even as you're scrolling for something to distract you from considering wether or not that's true. Has that ever been true? Even as she is looking for the next sentence or picture or video or bit of smut; the next thing, a new thrill.

Sure, she has had some laughs, good times, weird experiences. She remembers times when she felt alive, but that feeling always fade ... eventually ... and then she has left trying to suck the marrow out of crack dry bones of the memory.

Truthfully, there's no amount of happiness, sex, intrigue, excitement, money, drugs, love, success or any thing that fills in all the spaces. There's always room for the maddening feeling that she is not really feeling anything. The soul-numbing feeling that she is just going through the motions ...

Sometimes people call this ennui, but maybe she was started to wonder if that's too optimistic of a prognosis

The though that keeps her awake at night, which if part of the reason mornings are so rough for her. Is that maybe this is just what life is: A series of dull moments and tedious tasks broken up by fleeting sensations of something actually worth living for.

For as long as she has been chasing them, she doesn't even know what causes those sensations. But all she can do is keep reaching for them. Sometimes it's impossible for her to name things that are actually worth living for.

All she knows is that she desperately wants to be more than just the measure of an unspecified number of breaths and counting.