panic

A noise woke me from my slumber.  I call it slumber, not sleep, because I had only been dozing off and on throughout the night anyway.  We’d tried to go to bed early, tried to be good knowing the hectic days we both had ahead of us, but as is often the case: that knowing that we needed to be sleeping made it that much harder to actually sleep.

The noise had been a crashing sound.  Something in the room or the adjacent bathroom being knocked over and tumbling down to the ground.  A cascade of noises, really, with a solid thump to cap it off.  The cats, I thought as the last strings of my tentative hold on sleep were severed completely.

I checked for pressure, weight, on my feet or next to my legs and found none there.  That absence solidified the truth of the situation, the source of the noise.  Definitely the cats.  What are they doing up so early?

Maybe it’s not early?!  Panic hit me like a ton of bricks.  My chest heaved with the blow, my mind reeled, and my arms flailed towards my clock.  Am I late?  Did I sleep through my alarm?

I pulled the clock towards my face, so I could read the time without putting on my glasses.  4:38…  My sleepy brain took a moment to do the math.  I still have 22 minutes I can sleep.

I heaved myself back into a sleeping position, pulled the blankets back up under my chin and sighed heavily.  And then I stayed there, awake, listening to the cats getting into trouble, until the alarm went off and I got up to start my (now even) long(er) day.