The Morning After

You wake up and forget. For about four seconds.

The alarm goes off at the same time it always does. You reach for your phone. You think about the meeting at 10. Then you remember: there is no meeting at 10. There is no meeting. You don’t work there anymore.

Four seconds of normalcy followed by the full weight of everything that happened.

This happens every morning for months. The length of the forgetting gets shorter. The weight gets no lighter. You stop setting the alarm eventually, which means you stop pretending you have somewhere to be.

The morning after getting fired isn’t one morning. It’s sixty mornings. A hundred. Every one of them containing four seconds of amnesia followed by a day of remembering.