It’s a slow process for you, waking up. You come up the hill of consciousness cold and leaden at your tips, moving through your morning routine like a piece of clockwork, an automaton designed and built so long ago that the purposeful movements of showering, eating, and dressing have had all the meaning stripped from them, have become as arcane and gracefully alien as a ballet. You are always more than half asleep, the soft shapes of your dreams real in a way that your brittle face in the mirror is not.

Sometimes there’s a sliver of connection between sleep and waking, a thin membrane where the bowl of the sky dips down to the bowl of the water. Today you pop out of your shirt to find you’ve drawn a door on the wall next to your closet. None of the lines are quite straight, none of the corners are exactly square, but they’re close enough. There’s a biblical verse written on the door in red crayon in your handwriting. You knock and settle back to wait for the world to open unto you.