Teaching Feeling: The Novel.

The Morning Before Love

I wake up anxious the morning that mystery man came to my door, claiming to know me long before, talking about me saving his life.

When I looked at my watch I was exalted, scared I dare say. It took me a while to react at the time, which is customary for me. From a young age I never had the heavy sleep, let alone enough laziness to sleep late and play lazy. In fact, the idea of standing still doing nothing but wondering why I'm still breathing has made me feel a strong feeling of repelling that makes me shudder. I don't like it. I can't stand it.

Perhaps that has a lot to do with my achievements at an early age, and on the part I would contract, also be the cause of how unpopular I was. It was never clear to me if the people were the idiots or I was. At the end of the day, someone has to be, right?

At least that's what my dad used to say.

When I got up I felt numb, overwhelmed. Getting up like this wasn't normal, let alone pleasant. The tingling sensation in my arms made me feel a horrendous spine of bad foreboding. As if deep down He knew from beforehand that he was going to spend later in the morning.

Interestingly, that day was strange, both the way I started it and the way I ended up. Maybe that's how it was planned. Someone, in writing this day in the infinite history of mankind, it occurred to him that it was especially strange to me. It makes me feel a little arrogant to think that way, I'm not that special. Maybe it was just weird because it must have been. There wasn't to be a motive.

It just happened.

I pulled my sheets and took them off. After a long, boring and misunderstood moment looking at the ground I decided to get up completely. I stretched, and once again, to my head came my mother's thousands of comments about the incessant sound of my bones when I thundered.  They were always more of a mockery. Something funny must have been for the woman who stopped me from making ironic comments about how her only 20-year-old seemed to have more atrophied bones than her own parents. I would have been amused, I don't deny it, if I wasn't the physically ill son of an old man. 

And, in that instant, I came up with a joke from my father highlighting the irony that was in that I didn't take very good care of my body. This time, I accepted the fact gracefully while i put on my slippers. What, come on, if there was a comical air in the irony of the subject. 

I opened the door to my closet, i got one of my gray sweaters and one of my black jeans. I liked to dress simple. First of all, because everything I was going to wear was obviously going to be overshadowed by the white robe I wore for my work. And secondly, because I didn't go out on the street much. He would always go out shopping at the local market, stop for breakfast at the restaurant in the middle of the square and come home. 

I've never had many friends, no acquaintances, much less partners. My social circle always settled on a few, relatives mostly those of the kind you greet for the simple fact of being family. So things like going out and killing time was nothing I was mildly accustomed to. 

I took my robe, put it on me and slowly went down to my office. Sometimes, to say most of the way, it was a hassle to have to attend the whole office by myself. But in the absence of money to hire a nurse, and lack of acquaintances to whom to ask for help, I was convinced that I never needed anything when it comes to inventorying every morning. It was first on my list, I was just about to take my notebook where I kept the record of it and start with my day when they knocked on my door with notorious scandal. Not the one at the pharmacy, which was a few feet to the right, which I found strange. No one called me before time to know what hours I was available to, being that I was already well known and all my patients already knew well my schedule, which was simple and incredibly silly to learn.