Most mornings, I reach to snooze my first of ten alarms that I have set; my entire body creaks. I hear pops and cracks in joints I didn’t know existed. I let out exasperated groans and moans. If a camera were positioned in the corner opposite my bed, whatever footage collected could easily be mistaken for found footage of some mysterious beast in the wilderness. On the rare and unfortunate occasions in which someone witnesses my morning ritual, they ask me, “What’s the matter?” and I answer simply, “My body just aches.”
My morning aches aren’t attributed in their entirety to my bad knees and poor lower back. It’s the few seconds in the morning when I regain consciousness after effectively forgetting myself for the few hours I was paralyzed in my bed; it’s the overwhelming sense of becoming myself once again. It’s not that being me is a particularly painful experience, but the exhaustion of remembering my life anew for a couple of seconds every morning is something I can best describe as an ache.
The worst morning aches come after difficult nights.
The word ache comes from the Middle English word aken and the Old English word acan, both of which mean to “suffer continued pain.” Which to me (a not-a-morning person), is exactly what I would use to describe waking up every morning, a continuous action that causes me continued pain. The worst morning aches come after difficult nights. Sometimes I’m up studying for a test I’m certain I might fail, or I’m missing my friends from home, and I’m sending them a sappy text message about missing them while crying over my Thai takeout dinner; after emotionally exerting myself, I fall asleep blissfully unaware for a while. When I wake up the next morning, all the emotions from the night before come flooding back into the forefront of my consciousness, but not alone; in the process of reviving myself, I’ve also received a movie-like recreation of the embarrassing fall I took down the stairs as a fifth grader and that one time in high school when I spilled my iced coffee on the orchestra room carpet. Forced to suffer the continued pain of remembering my every embarrassing moment every time I wake up.
...I don’t hurt; my mind and body are simply feeling the daily whispers of all the pain that has at one point been suffered.
It’s not a feeling of hurt or a feeling of pain, these words describe the feeling in far too one-dimensional of a way. It doesn’t hurt to remember myself again, and it doesn’t cause me pain to revive in the mornings. It’s an ache. In the same way that my joints confuse temporary lack of mobility for permanent retirement, in the mornings their creaks aren’t painful; rather, it’s the momentary feeling of ineptitude where my joints have to become themselves again, like relieving the pain they suffered when I first learned to move them. My joints aren’t in active pain, and I am not in active pain; I don’t hurt; my mind and body are simply feeling the daily whispers of all the pain that has at one point been suffered. And so, my mornings are not full of pain and hurt, just ache.
