No Time Left

No Time Left

By: Nancy LaMar-Rodgers

6:15am. Pounding alarm. Not warm and fuzzy like that damn Hatch thing that everybody in the group raves about. No, she has the loud bullhorn type of blast—the kind that says don’t even think about laying your lazy good for nothing head back down. Be quiet, she hears in her head and wonders why daddy is mad. It’s ok, she hears her mother whisper and then the voice is gone. She hits snooze.

This is not how any day should begin. Well, he’s got a job now, her mother’s squeaky-clean high-pitched voice, is pinging off the sides of her skull. Her toxic positivity with her gooey smile and her uninterrupted relationship with the façade of all things. Well, isn’t that special, she thinks, my mom is the church lady from SNL. Only she’s not and never has been. I’m making your favorite tonight. What favorite? My favorite drug? Are you stirring up some meth mom? With a nice side dish of crack. She thinks.  Yummy. A home cooked drug fest. She wonders if her mother was ever actually 19 years old. She realizes that she would have had to be because you can’t go from sweet legal age to 49-year-old-opioid addicted Stepford wife overnight, but it sure feels that way.

But maybe today will be the day that she comes home to a favorite something. A favorite scent or dessert or anything that she would describe as a favorite—a photo perhaps? One of her sister? Maybe?

She exhales and begins taking a few calming breaths.

Snooze blast #1. This time it will be different. Today is the first day of the rest of your life-mom assures her every morning just to make sure she hasn’t forgotten the last 13 million times. Scratch. She can feel the bite on her ankle and wants to reach down but her arm is too tired to try, and her ankle is just too far away. Motivation. Yes, that’s the word they all love to throw around. You need to find something that motivates you to do better. That’s just how it works. Come on there must be some thing or someone that you want to do better for or be better for. She thinks on that, gotta do it for yourself, someone says behind her left eye. She rubs the side of her temple.

Snooze blast #2. We don’t have time for this, says the collective chorus of counselors and teachers and parents and friends. It’s the friends who hurt the most. Sorry but we don’t have time for your bullshit anymore. The parents are the usual—we don’t have time for this, some of us have to WORK! Don’t get her started on the school counselors. She thought it was their job to have time for it all. Time to let her cry and complain and feel empty and time to let her scream and talk about the nightmares and time to let her draw or write down her feelings and time to just breathe. But they don’t—seems nobody has time for any of it.

 Scratch the itch. The quiet voice behind the right eyeball now.Can’t reach? The others ask. What if she just doesn’t get up. Come up with an excuse—why not—one thing they always said she exceled at. But she knows that she wants to be better. Wants to feel better. Maybe the Hatch would work, she rolls that thought around till it goes through both hemispheres of her brain and out both ears. 

The covers are now tangled around her ankle. The one with the itch— which has moved to the top of her left foot. Use the other foot to scratch it. Wow, she thinks, sometimes you do have good ideas, I think I’ll try that. Jesus now its wrapped around and feels like an Ace Bandage wrapped too tight. She remembers the hourglass shape of the little metal clasps with their sharp pointy edges to secure the bandage around her wrists. Why do they use those? Cruel joke, she thinks and begins giggling to herself then pulls the covers over her head.

The snooze alarm goes off every minute. Alarm blast #3.

Who decided that was a good snooze time amount? Jeez, it takes me longer to tie my shoes. How could a designer of an alarm clock do that? Surely a Machiavellian type. Gets a thrill out of watching on a wall of screens, rubbing his hands together with a maniacal grin on his face just laughing and jumping up and down at the sound of those blaring horns coming from bedside casualties everywhere. Maybe he’s a failed conductor, she thinks, wanting only to make clashing sounds, with horns blaring and steel drums banging and orchestrate them all into one hellish symphony. Rachmaninoff-he was tormented, wasn’t he? Maybe that’s it. This failed composer now sits behind his iron curtain in his mother’s basement and gets off on the sound of violently awakening the most vulnerable of us, or at least those who are hard of hearing.

Blast # 3. She has to get up and make at least one more attempt at scratching that itch. Just rework the bandage with your other foot and then when you get it off, you can then scratch the itchy foot. Where would I be without you guys? She wants them to know how much she appreciates them.

Stuck in a loop again. She remembers the pervy counselor. He was just so off in that way that people can be off. Not weird, because I am a huge fan of weird. I like outcast as well but weird just encompasses all my favorite people on the planet-like Andy Warhol for example or whoever invented spam. You gotta love these people- I mean they just didn’t give a shit what other people thought and as a matter of fact the more they didn’t care the more people liked what they were doing. Now don’t get me wrong, I think that people who try to be weird are bogus. Like Jackson Pollack. I mean I hear he was kind of a tortured soul but was he weird? I don’t think so. I mean I could do that stuff-just throw a bunch of paint on a canvas and call it art. It was the emperor’s new clothes if you ask me. I liked the kid in that story. Hey can’t you all see that he’s naked. She feels that way sometimes, especially in group. She wants to shout out; can’t you see that they’re all full of shit. That they’re all naked. She knows she will be kicked out of group but still feels like the kid in the fairytale, where nobody hears her and if they do, they just want to shut her down. It’s hard for her, being able to see and know what’s going on and not being able to shout it from the rooftops.

Alarm siren #4. She should have been a town crier. That thought lodges itself. Would have been good at that job, she thinks. Paul Revere, he’s her new hero. What a great town crier. No internet handy to send the warning message out to all your subs. Nope that guy had to mount his horse, grab himself some kind of oil burning lamp and ride through the streets-which I’m sure were not paved. But he did it anyway-without GPS—how do any of us get around these days. Now that’s a cool guy. Changing history and not trying to be cool or weird. Just doing the right thing to help as many people as possible. She wants to talk about Paul Revere in group today and suggest that everyone channel their inner Paul. Should I get a tee-shirt with his face on it? She smiles broadly at that thought. Maybe check Indeed or Monster to see if there are any town crier posts. But what would the modern-day equivalent be? She doesn’t want to think about translating the 18th century job market into YouTube influencer speak. She’s still tired.

Her right foot has unraveled the sheet. She thinks she will name her right foot Paul and her left foot Revere. She doesn’t imagine anyone will ask her what her feet are named but just in case. A tattoo might help. But she is completely against tattooing anyone’s name on her body. She remembers the guy behind the counter at the Citgo convenient mart—he had a name tattooed on either side of his neck. She asked him whose names they were and his response solidified her commitment. “My kids—well at least I thought they were my kids.” Ouch she thought, then paid for her Snickers and Redbull and ran out of there as fast as she could. Sometimes she hated when her theories were so damn right.

Blast #5. Ok sweet cheeks as her stepfather used to call her, time to get up. He was stepdaddy number two, and she actually really liked him. He was kind and used to take her for ice-cream and to the swing set at the park. He ended up dying of a heart attack on her tenth birthday. Still miss him. But her mom had number three within a year and he was awful. Mean, drunk and ignorant. He didn’t even have a job, so she didn’t know why her mother married him. Didn’t matter at that point, because she and her older sister were on their own anyway by the time they got to middle school. But that’s a story for another day, she cast that thought out.

Thirty seconds left. Blankets and sheet thrown to the side, she swung both free legs over the side and planted Paul and Revere on the cold bare floor and looked at the evil alarm clock. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2. Hit the off button. 6:20am. Made it.