The ceiling knows my eyes by now—we’ve had this conversation
since somewhere past the junction between the dark and dark-adjacent,
the water stain above the baseboard holds its shape the way a scar does,
personal and permanent, no escaping the applause
of one’s own mind at three AM performing its greatest show.
The darkness thinned to dirty ash and called itself the glow
of morning, which is something I’ve agreed to call it too—
I’ll accept the label. Get up. Impersonate the you.
Grey before the alarm, grey after —
built from the wreckage of exhausted and the skeleton of laughter.
I’ve run the arithmetic and all the sums arrive the same:
grey before the alarm. Grey’s the only name.
Grey in the wiring, grey from the chest out,
the world’s still accelerating and I long ago lost the count
of mornings that arrived already secondhand, already spent—
grey before the alarm. Another day that went.
The shower was a documented fact of the morning’s loose accounting.
The shirt was found, the minimum extracted from the mounting
evidence of a life still technically in motion—I’ve eaten something,
I’ve told myself the lie I’ve been delivering without cutting
any new material since longer than I care to excavate:
today will be the different one. The crack. The clean slate.
The calendar says otherwise. The mirror says the same thing back.
The day arrived already used and borrowed. I stayed on track.
Grey before the alarm, grey in the thread,
the kind of quiet that accumulates inside your head
until the weight of it becomes the weather of the room—
grey before the alarm. The low-grade, slow-burn gloom.
Grey in the seventeen things I haven’t said,
grey in the messages still gathering beside my bed,
grey in the phone full of the things I haven’t done—
grey before the alarm. I made it. Technically I won.