In the morning I don't hear the alarm.

I hear the song I left on repeat last night, and when I wake up I have less than an hour to get ready for work.

I stumble into the bathroom and blink my red, bleary eyes. I take a hurried bath, wash my hair, think of doing something with it as I light a cigarette, and then think better of it, like most days. It will hang in a deceptive and contradictory cheery golden curtain over my right eye, as it always does.

I smear dark lack of color around my eyes, slather myself in a lotion that supposedly smells similar to a butterfly garden (I consider the smell rather offensively flippant, but I assume it's socially acceptable and probably expected), and gather my things to leave the house after turning on my iPod and hunting down the same song I woke up to.

The sky is gray.

The building is a dark block against the sky with a deceptively cheery golden roof, and I assume we compliment one another well. The exterior matches the interior not at all.

I clock into my arguably voluntary prison and do the morning work while a girl who seems not to like me puts on her headphones because I have mine on and does a lot of nothing.

For three hours I am in neutral, I don't really exist except that I sit and talk and stock paper and provide as much customer service as I can when restrained by the unforgiving bonds of corporate policy and capitalism.

Then I take my first break, and outside the wind has kicked up, and it runs invisible fingers through my hair and envelops me like warm hands, unquestionably welcome because there is no human mind driving them.

I stare at the sun through my eyelids and pull menthol smoke into my lungs.

I listen to another song, and then I cease to exist again.

Sometime later, I am walking across the lot, striding with a purpose, and that purpose is alcohol.

The building across the street is deceptively somber.

Inside, country music blares in a way it never should, and my own eclectic collection is turned up accordingly.

I walk the same path as every other day, straight to the basin where the selection of beer is on ice, and I select a Coors as I always do if only because Coors is the only thing my mother will drink, and I suppose there is no significance in that besides that I still maintain a shred of respect for where I've come from in spite of what it has become, what it has always been.

Because in small ways I am my mother, bitter and self-sacrificing and the glare in the photos is the same, smeared with humor like vaseline but ugly and distorted beneath, real under the disguise of deniability.

Unlike my mother, I do not take these things out on those I love.

I hate only myself.

I stroll across the room, taking comfort as always in the way no one speaks to me because I wouldn't hear them. This morning the gaggle in the break room tried, and I pretended not to hear. Headphones are an immeasurable comfort. Being deaf would be a blessing beyond imagination.

Sometimes they take the caps off my bottles, and I hate that. I am trying to keep track, to keep mementos of these moments when I am completely alone, these moments that are mine because no one knows where I go when I'm on lunch, no one knows that I numb myself for an hour and get lost in the music and the disturbing painting over my usual booth, The painting is a carousel horse, white with large black eyes that are contorted in an exaggerated expression of pain. The paint around its lips has worn off, and it has no teeth.

The pole in its back seems to be a mortal injury.

The horse and I are trapped, we are ugly and we are presented in public places as if we are perfectly acceptable because no one seems to notice.

The horse and I keep company for an hour, five days a week, and sometimes I wish he and I could share a drink.

Probably no one would notice.

The ceiling fans are in perfect sync.

There are a pair of Asian boys across the room, two African-American police officers, an elderly man and a woman in a tattered shirt that I would like to speak to. Her eyes are sad, and they remind me of the horse. She sits alone as well. Maybe she was yesterday. I don't recall.

I wonder where I fall among these people. I am a high-powered legal mind wearing dog tags, longing for my tan boots while wearing black and making the process of buying cheap and typically defective furniture as painless as possible.

I am an over-achiever in an under-achiever's life.

I am finally buzzed enough to go back to work.

The bottles always go in the bathroom trash receptacle. I smear on the butterfly garden again, check a face that no one looks at and head back outside, lighting another coffin nail before I am even outside.

I spend twenty minutes chain smoking before I cease to exist again.

When I come to, the wind has its hands on me again, now gentle, now wanting, and the two of us share a smoke.

I rest my face on my bicep, smelling the clean scent of sun-warmed polo shirt.

I sit on the curb, and I listen to the same song from this morning.

The singer wants to know how he is supposed to breathe without her, I want to know why I'm breathing in the first place.

Finally the car arrives, and I am someone else again, chatty and cheerful like when I don't exist except I'm not at work and so I do.

I get home and this is the one out of the every three days that I eat, and they have made coffee and so I am as content as I ever am.

I change clothes, I sit here in this space on the same side of my oversized bed as I always do, laptop seated comfortably in my lap, lamp on so I can see the keys, and this time I remembered to get my glasses from the bathroom so my sister doesn't have to, although she met me on my way down the hall because she knows that I forget them, and like the wind and the sun and the horse, her I can actually love.

She lies on the foot of my bed and reads my battered Sartre, and I type as I listen to the same song from this morning.

I stroke the top of her head with my socked foot, and the silence is comfortable.

Until tomorrow, I exist.