Another Clockwork Day

Feeling morning sunlight streaming through my apartment’s window is, hands down, one of the best parts of my morning. It competes for the title of the best part with the pleasant delight of petting my sleepy cats and the satisfying deliciousness of fresh espresso. When my morning has all three of these elements, it’s almost perfect. If it has all those and I still make it to the train without power walking, it’s a truly perfect morning.

The only thing that can make these experiences less pleasant is waking up with one hour less of sleep. My head feels cloudy and there’s a dull aching behind my eyes as I reach for my phone to silence the chiming of the alarm. It’s not the first alarm, normally going off at six-thirty in the morning, but the “don’t completely waste your weekend” alarm that sounds at nine-thirty.

The sound is, in theory, a pleasant one. But I’ve heard it enough times that the dark part of my soul abhors the melody. I tap off the alarm and rub my forehead. I don’t expect the sensation to dispel my headache, but I do it anyway.

I think back to the night before and try to remember why I feel so awful. I remember turning on the nine-thirty alarm just in case I was too tired to get up early. The headache only seems to grow worse as I move around and try to sit up. I don’t dare try to stare at my phone, even though I did have a few more notifications than usual. There’s no way immediately gluing myself to a screen will make this headache any better.

I can remember having the wherewithal to set my clocks back for daylight savings, but it had been a pleasantly uneventful evening of reading. I don’t remember much else. I looked at the sunlight streaming in through my windows, wishing that daylight savings didn’t have that initial effect of making it darker in the morning for the first few weeks.

I refocus my thoughts as I lazily pet Wolfey’s head. My little gray cat with wolf-like golden eyes blinks affectionately and leans into the snuggle. His sister, Misty Foot, jumps onto the bed for her morning pet session. I keep both hands busy petting them, one hand per kitty, hoping that the headache would fade in the next few minutes.

It doesn’t really make sense. I keep a disciplined sleeping schedule, which is why I set an alarm on weekends, even if I usually wake up naturally before it goes off. It helps keep me alert and productive.

The drawback is that it does make it harder to bounce back from disturbances to my sleep. However, that one-hour disturbance of daylight savings really shouldn’t evoke a headache this bad.

I disengage myself from my cats and they follow me into the kitchen with more eagerness than usual. I eye them for a moment as Misty Foot meows loudly and I redirect my attention to their food and water.

“Oh goodness, you guys ate everything,” I say incredulously, “and you got so much hair in the water fountain.”

I say these words aloud like I’m speaking to another person, but of course, they only respond with meows. It’s like they’re saying “yes, human, we did everything! So hurry up with breakfast!”

It’s spring, so it’s shedding season, but I feel that immediate pang of guilt that their water fountain isn’t perfectly clean. I am a much better cat parent than this.

I retrieve their fresh, raw cat food from the freezer and quickly start preparing a plate for them. I apologize to them repeatedly, as if they understand the sentiment in English. I give them extra food at set it down on the floor. They both devour it and I take to cleaning their fountain.

The pain behind my eyes intensifies as I work, but my cats come first. I assume it’s just some combination of a sleep deprivation headache and a caffeine withdrawal headache. I don’t know for sure, but musing on the cause feels like a productive use of my thoughts as I scrub down the pieces of their fountain.

Once it’s back in business and burbling fresh water with a new filter inside, I take to addressing my own needs. That usually means espresso and water until lunchtime, but I decide the headache is too severe. I retreat to the bathroom to find Tylenol and then go back to the kitchen for water and a banana.

When I reach the stylish banana holder I probably paid too much for, I wince. They are substantially riper than I remember them being. They’re still good, but there are countless brown spots materializing on the peels. I pluck one off tentatively, deciding it’s not a bad day for banana bread.

I don’t rush as I pour coffee beans into my grinder and listen to its mechanical cacophony. I warm up the espresso machine, tamp the fresh grounds down, and listen to the machine groan with pressure as it produces my coffee. Once it finishes, I perch on one of the high stools at my kitchen counter and cautiously peel a banana as I look at Wolfey and Misty Foot. They’re still wolfing down their breakfast.

It strikes me as odd, but I try to relax into the aroma of freshly ground coffee and make the best of my morning. With any luck, the headache won’t be able to ruin everything for much longer.

The peace is interrupted when my phone chimes with the very specific notification meaning it’s someone from the office. I glance over my phone and stare at it suspiciously for a moment. My job is — thankfully — very good to its employees when it comes to work-life balance. In over a year, I’ve only been contacted on the weekend twice.

Something must be wrong.

I pick it up even more tentatively than I peeled the somewhat overripe banana. The clock reads that it’s now a little after ten o’clock. I look at the notification and see that it’s from my boss, which awakens a little flicker of anxiety in me, even though she’s a lovely person.

Elisa: I just wanted to check in, is everything okay? Did your train get delayed?

I stare at her name, I stare at the time, and it feels like I just swallowed a bucket of ice water rather than a few sips of hot espresso. My hands instantly start sweating and feel clammy. My mind reels; daylight savings was on Saturday night — why would she text me on a Sunday with a message like that?

My eyes fly to the date displayed at the top of my phone’s screen.

It’s incorrect.

It’s an entire day off.

It looks like it just skipped a day, like Sunday never even existed. Despite my confusion and disbelief, my body is still reacting like it’s one of those ridiculous anxiety dreams where I’ve forgotten it’s a weekday.

I open my calendar app from work, figuring it couldn’t also be wrong. I check frantically, panic rising, but that app agrees — it’s Monday. My headache pulses and I start to feel sicker as that icy cold water feels like it’s overflowing in my body. Just like I am not a bad cat parent, I am never late for work. It’s almost not a wonder my boss inquired so politely since my attendance track record is spotless.

I open the train schedule app, desperate to see the spotty weekend service. The trains connecting the city to its outside suburbs are never perfect and they leave with the abysmal frequency of every two hours on weekends.

But there’s no spotty schedule today.

It’s running like a slightly slow clock, with trains every thirty minutes, and the next one leaving in twenty-three minutes. It’s undeniably Monday, it’s indisputably past 10 o’clock — meaning I am extremely late.

I can’t miss that train.

It’s identical to an anxiety nightmare I’ve woken up from dozens of times.

I leave my half-eaten banana on the counter as I frantically hurry into my bedroom. I scramble to get into professional clothes and vow to scrub my face well since there’s no way I have time to shower.

I throw myself together in record time then put more food out for Wolfey and Misty Foot. I grab my keys but hesitate for one second. I take a step back to the kitchen counter to toss the remainder of the espresso into my minty, freshly-brushed mouth, likely ruining the fact that I brushed my teeth.

The situation feels bizarre, but that just confirms that I need coffee to handle it.

With less than ten minutes to make the fifteen-minute trip to the train station, I rush out the door. I make a dozen typos as I profusely apologize to my boss for being ridiculously late. I warn her that I won’t be at the office until after 11 and promise to stay late. She takes the news well, which just makes me feel worse.

An entire day of my carefully planned life is gone without a trace. I have no explanation for it, no logic behind it. It doesn’t make any sense, not even as I’m sprinting down the sidewalk to the station.

I think back to Saturday night, but nothing happened that could have made me sleep through an entire day. I rack my pounding head for memories, but I hadn’t drunk anything, I hadn’t eaten anything strange, and I’m far too light a sleeper to just ignore the sun coming up.

How could I sleep for an entire day? Did I suddenly become a miniature version of Rip Van Winkle? I can’t make sense of it. It’s like Sunday simply disappeared into a vacuum, never to be seen, felt, or experienced. It’s just enough lost time to make me think I’ve lost my mind but not enough to do irreparable damage to my life.

Yet I know the day must’ve happened — it explains my poor cats’ hunger and the overly ripened bananas. There’s no logical explanation for the situation, but it sheds light on the oddities of the morning.

It still doesn’t make sense, but an eerie feeling settles in over me as I hear the train’s horn in the distance. It’s just enough time disappeared to disrupt my life, but not enough for anyone to realize I wasn’t there for it.

~

Author’s Note: This short story was written for the prompt “before bed, you put your clock ahead one hour for daylight saving time. When you wake up, you realize you’ve gone forward a lot more than one hour.”

This was a fun prompt, but I decided to take that “gone forward a lot more than one hour” and twist it a little. To someone who really cares about productivity and making the most of their time, even just one day feels like a lot of time lost. Plus, to avoid going all Rip Van Winkle, I thought it would be interested if our protagonist here had to pick up the pieces all by herself and figure out what happened with very little intervention from others.