Alarming

I’m in a bad relationship.

Things were good at first, but recently, things have changed. I’m just not getting what I need anymore. So I think it’s time for me to break up with my alarm clock.

When I was a kid, my dad and I had a routine. He would yell for me to get up in the morning, I would grunt that I was awake and that was his cue that he could head into the shower. I be back asleep before the water even turned on. Twenty minutes later, he would yell for me to actually get up and I would hurl some kind of teenage-fuelled rage at him while trudging towards the bathroom with the grace and poise of a caveman. And with that, we'd start the day. It was not an ideal system.

It wasn’t until university that I discovered that mornings didn’t have to be hostile. Since my dad was no longer available to be a human rooster, I had to find some other way to rouse myself each day. That was when I found my alarm clock. 


It wasn’t a revolutionary concept, but it changed my life.

It was the perfect combination. I was now in control of when and how I woke up, setting the mood of the morning with the appropriate song to get me up with a smile rather than a grimace—James Brown’s “Get up off of that thing” was a particular favourite. 

But a few weeks ago, my long-term love for my alarm clock hit a snag. It was set to wake me in time to get business-ready for a meeting, but it reset itself in the middle of the night. Instead of waking up to Estelle’s “American Boy,” that morning I bolted upright in hurried panic and rushed out the door in a mismatched outfit and makeup resembling a child’s finger painting.

Thankfully, my meeting got cancelled just as I boarded the bus so I quickly hopped off and returned home to fix things with my morning companion, try and get us back to the way things used to be.  

My punishment was almost sleeping through my flight to California the following morning.

It’s hard to admit when things are over, but by all indications, I think it might be time for a change. Tomorrow is the dawn of a new day and I want to be able to wake up and see it.