Eleven Steps to Morning

I’ve been awake since 1:47 a.m., watching the ceiling fan cut the same four shadows into the same four corners of my room, and by 3:00 a.m. I can’t do it anymore. My mouth is dry. My legs feel like they belong to someone else, someone more tired than me.

There’s a job in another city sitting in my inbox, an offer with a deadline attached: “let me know by 8 a.m.” I’ve re-read the email so many times the words have stopped meaning anything, the way any word does if you say it enough times in a row. I don’t know what I’m going to write back. I only know I have five hours to decide, and none of them are going to happen lying here.

I push the covers off and my feet find the floor without permission from the rest of me.

The house is kind of quiet, but still has a sound to it. Like the pressure of a hum in my ears. I open my bedroom door slow, the way I’ve done it since I was seven and convinced that fast doors woke up whatever lived under the bed, and I step into the hall.

It’s longer than it should be.

I know this hallway like the back of my hand. I have walked it barefoot for twenty-six years, in footie pajamas and prom heels and the day I moved my last box out and the day I moved back in eight months later. It is eleven steps to the bathroom. I have counted them my whole life without meaning to.

Tonight I take the first step and the wall six feet ahead of me breaks apart. It dissolves into small square pieces of black, like the picture is buffering… Like the house doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep loading in real time. The pixels hang there for a second, humming faintly, and then they resolve into something else. Not the hallway. A doorway I recognize. I can’t seem to make sense of it, so I keep walking.

Step one. My childhood bedroom, the old one on Maple Street, with the popcorn ceiling and the glow stars I peeled off the wall the week we packed up. I’m four, maybe five, and I’ve had the nightmare again, the one about the ocean swallowing the house, and I’m crying so hard I can’t get words out, just sound, just need. My mother comes in without turning on the light. She doesn’t tell me it wasn’t real. She sits on the edge of the bed and puts her hand flat on my chest, right over the drum of it, and says, “I’ve got you. Breathe when I breathe.” She breathes, slow, exaggerated, until mine matches hers without me trying.

I blink and I’m back in the real hallway, except six feet ahead of me it goes black again, pixelating out like an old TV screen with no antenna signal. Something inside of me understands that I have to keep walking. That the bathroom is still ten steps away. That this is simply what the hallway is doing tonight.

Step two. The black resolves into the elementary school pickup line, that stretch of sidewalk outside the gym doors. I’m eight. Josie Jay has just told the whole line, loud enough for everyone, that my shoes are the kind from the discount store, and I feel my face do the thing where it gets hot from the inside. My pop-pop is walking up from the car because we’re late, and he sees my face before I can arrange it into something else. He crouches down right there on the sidewalk in front of everyone, laces one shoe tighter even though it doesn’t need it, and says, “You know what’s expensive? Being unkind. It costs people everything eventually. You’re not paying that bill, so you’re fine.”

Step three, and the dark again, patient, waiting for me the way it’s always waiting. I think, distantly, that I should be more frightened than I am. But it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels like being handed things I dropped a long time ago and forgot I was still missing.

Twelve years old. My grandmother’s kitchen, the one that smelled like burnt sugar and cigarettes even though she quit smoking before I was born, like the walls kept the memory for her. She’s teaching me to make her pie crust, and I keep working the dough too much, warming the butter with my hands until it goes greasy and wrong, getting frustrated in the way only a twelve-year-old can, all or nothing, ready to give up and never bake again. She doesn’t take the dough from me. She just puts her hands over mine, cooling them, slowing them.

“You’re rushing it because you’re scared it won’t work,” she says. “Everything you rush is really just something you’re scared of.”

I didn’t cry then. I feel it building now, a hot pressure behind my eyes for a woman who has been gone six years, who I would give almost anything to stand in a kitchen with one more time, flour on both our hands.

Step four. The floor under my bare feet is real, I can feel the cold hardwood, the specific squeak two-thirds of the way to the bathroom that’s been there since the house settled funny in ‘09, but the walls keep going. I press one hand against the actual wall for a second, real plaster, real paint, just to remember it’s there, then let go and keep moving because some part of me wants to see the next one.

Fifteen. My first real heartbreak, if you can call it that at fifteen, though it felt like the whole architecture of the world at the time. Sitting on the bathroom floor of this very house, this exact bathroom I’m seven steps from right now, knees against my chest, certain that no one had ever hurt like this, certain it would never stop. My older cousin Renee, who was staying with us that summer, sat down on the tile next to me without asking why, just sat, our shoulders touching. After a long time she said, “This is going to be the smallest heartbreak you ever have. I’m not saying that to make it smaller now. I’m saying it so you know you’re building the muscle.”

I hated that sentence at fifteen. I go back to it more than almost anything she ever told me.

Step five and six, the black comes faster now, or maybe I’m just less afraid of it, walking into the dissolving dark like it’s a doorway instead of a wound.

Nineteen, my dorm room, the semester I called my mother crying at 2 a.m. because I’d failed a chemistry exam so badly I was sure it meant something permanent about me, some verdict on the shape of my whole future. She didn’t argue with the crying. She let me finish. Then: “One test is not a sentence, honey. It’s a data point. You’re allowed to be bad at something on your way to being good at something else. Nobody skips the bad-at-it part.”

Twenty-two, the first apartment, alone for the first time, standing over a stove trying to cook something that mattered to me and burning it anyway. I remember catching myself before the old spiral could start, hearing my own voice, new, borrowed from all of them, say out loud to the empty kitchen, “Okay. Try again. It’s just dinner.” I was a little shocked at myself, that I’d caught the thought before it caught me.

Step seven. Twenty-four. The breakup that actually broke something, the one I don’t like to look at directly even now. Standing in this hallway, back home for a while because I needed to be, at 3 a.m. exactly like tonight, unable to sleep for entirely different reasons, and my mother’s door opening because she heard me. No lecture, no “I told you so” she’d earned the right to say. Just her voice in the dark: “You don’t have to have it figured out tonight. You just have to get to morning.”

I’m crying now, actually crying, the real hallway and my real face wet with it, and the pixels ahead of me hold black a little longer this time, like the house is giving me a second to catch up to myself.

Step eight. This one isn’t the past. I know it the second the black clears, because I’m standing in it exactly as I am, in the tank top I fell asleep in, my hair the same mess, and it takes me a second to understand I’m looking at now. Not a memory. A mirror, or something like one. Twenty-six, sleepless again, an email open somewhere in a phone on a nightstand, still doing the thing where 3 a.m. turns into an audit of every choice I’ve made, every version of myself lined up down a hallway to be graded.

I understand, standing there looking at myself looking at myself, why the hallway did this tonight. It wasn’t showing me the past because the past is over. It was showing me I have never once actually been alone in this hallway, not really, not even now, even though tonight there’s no mother’s door creaking open, no cousin sitting down on cold tile, no grandmother’s hands over mine. They’re not standing here. But everything they gave me is standing here, wearing my face, waiting for me to be the one who says it this time.

I look at myself, twenty-six and exhausted and crying in a hallway that has just handed me my whole life back in dissolving frames, and I say it out loud, quiet, to no one, to everyone.

“You don’t have to solve it tonight. You just have to get to morning.”

Step nine. The pixels don’t come. The wall is just a wall, cream-colored, the same water stain near the ceiling from the leak two winters ago that nobody ever fixed.

Step ten. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

Step eleven. I’m standing in front of the bathroom door. It’s slightly ajar the way I always leave it. I push it open, and the light switch is exactly where it’s always been, and the tile is cold under my feet the ordinary way tile is cold, and I run the water and drink from my cupped hands like I did when I was small, before I trusted glasses not to slip.

I look at myself in the mirror. Just a girl who can’t sleep, with an email she hasn’t answered yet. Not pixelated. Not dissolving. Tired, is all, in the specific, human, three in the morning way, with a face that has all of theirs folded into it somewhere: my mother’s steadiness around the eyes, my grandmother’s stubborn mouth, my pop-pop’s readiness to crouch down and fix a lace that didn’t need fixing, just to give his hands something to do while his face caught up.

I dry my hands on the towel that’s hung on the same hook for a decade. I walk back down the hall, eleven steps, ordinary ones, no black, no static, just carpet and hardwood and the squeaky board, and I get into my own bed in my own room. I don’t answer the email tonight. I’m not going to. Whatever I decide, it can wait for a decent hour, for coffee, for a version of me that’s slept even a little.

I don’t fall asleep right away, either. But I’m not afraid of the dark anymore, or not the same way. I lie there in it and let it hold what it’s always been holding, quietly, this whole time: not monsters, just everyone who ever loved me well enough to leave something behind that I could use later, alone, at 3 a.m., walking down a hallway that only pretended, for one night, to be longer than eleven steps.