After the day I had today, there’s just this image that keeps ricocheting off the insides of my head of an angry child throwing a chair into the middle of my living room, like a demigod floating down from above the spruce trees and throwing a car and laying waste to the countryside with the help of a hot pink chest laser and a booming, ground-shaking voice that keeps repeating I will kill anyone who comes near.

The world in your head will now spin you into a kind of sinew, he says to me, and I’m reminded of the afternoons at York beach in Maine where I watched toffee spin behind the Goldenrod front window of my youth, back when I thought being sweet and flexible meant I’d get to last longer.

Eating piece after piece of that false promise until there was nothing left of me but wax wrapper, was sort of the point I remember. I’d fall asleep in the car ride home back to Concord, my stomach full, my jaw as sore as a bug’s wing caught in the aluminum fingers of a window screen, not a thought to think of, totally inebriated on sugar and sleep and unable to conjure a worry for the life of me.

I wish I’d known then that sometimes the world can stretch you out too much there’s no cognitive elasticity that can bring you back. Though nothing that a spot of mindfulness meditation and a hot shower can’t help with. But that’s if you can be mindful enough to think to do that and not go to bed like a giant water bug curling up under the blanket of a boat engine’s wake,

one which later will be seen by my fatigued and angry inner child – aren’t we all one – and mine, after I fall asleep, will put away the demigod costume and reach in and grab the nasty crab looking thing the size of a cigarette box, and hold it up and say to anybody who’s in the front office of my unconscious look at the size of this creature I will now make you eat.

But he doesn’t know and will never know because he sees so rigidly, that when I awake in the morning, the first thing I do is burn through negativity with the help of a cup of dark roast that contains within it the cleansing power of the sunlight shining through my blinds, followed by a hot shower that always makes me feel like I get a do over at being a boy knee deep in clouds of red lake looking off with a splash like he’s gotten away with everything, and even a little bit more than that. You would say anything to make yourself feel better, he tells me with a grinding of teeth,

and so, in one final convergent thought I tell him, yeah, I may have lost any interest in dreams or ambition and grown too comfortable with having giant insects placed on my tongue followed by a wrapping up and a sentimental send-off down the Nile of my mummy-like attraction to the death ceremony. And I will miss the late nights and skinny dipping in the brown water of being a turkey.

But it’s the mornings that really feed my soul and which I live for now, I say to him. That’s all I want these days, imaginary feathers of flight in my throat for those moments there is nothing left of me I can see or know and all that’s left to do is lift off under the river of another golden morning and for maybe a little while, become something as seemingly unmiraculous as ordinary sunlight. And you know, it’s kind of exciting to think about what I might become when one day I have to say goodbye to even this, to which he says, I don’t care. But he doesn’t have a choice.