I was awake, but my eyes didn’t want to open, almost as if cobwebs were holding my eyelids together. I wanted to roll back into the comfort of senselessness, I wanted to roam inside random dreams that were wacky enough to almost make me laugh. I didn’t want to wake up, but I couldn’t sleep either. My heart was thumping, and I was hot. I wondered if I had left the heating on the night before, I hadn’t. I was too awake to fall back to sleep, trying to make sense of my physical state. I was anxious from what I was becoming.

Looming at large was the daily drill of capitalism, I was supposed to be awake; I was supposed to grind away another day of my life writing computer code for computers sitting far away from me. It was a miracle that we could even do such a thing from our homes in pyjamas and slippers. I flipped my phone from its slumber like one would flip a beetle on summer grass; The underside glowed. I tore my eyes open to the faint glow. I was looking at a digital clock, 6:00AM it said. I swiped my thumb on the piece of glass, like I was trained to do by large corporations of this century. I looked at my calendar that had my time organised into precious chunks of meaningful conversations. The first meeting of the day wasn’t until a few hours. The light of my screen was becoming too much for my eyes, I blinked my eyes closed.

The bed was still warm, and my eyes were closed. The little cocoon of warm air was getting uncomfortable, so I slid my hands onto the cold sheet around me. There could be another human being, warm and in slumber, but I was held together by the cold. The air around the blanket was comforting, I threw my blanket off of me. The cold air came around me like ghosts trying to haunt adventurous teenagers, without restraint. I realised it was miserably cold outside, but I didn’t want to put the blanket back on. I wanted to float in cold like I would float at the deep end of a swimming pool on a fine summer evening, with a pointless fear of drowning nagging from the back of my head.

I started shivering.