Every morning, Leif re-entered the world when light from the rising sun descended the eastern wall of a city skyrise to his eighteenth-floor studio apartment, through the window’s plantation shutters, tilted at a few degrees, to his eyelids. The gradual warming of his skin in this way was, he found, the least-objectionable way to wake up, a preoccupation which made it difficult for him to sleep anywhere else, though not that he ever wanted to. He was as fond of his large windows as he was the silence of his abode. The suburbs, where his parents lived, were full of cars and children and lawnmowers, all of which ran at obscene hours in what seemed to him like active attempts at rousing him from slumber. Alarm clocks were the one exception in his otherwise silent morning routine, as an overcast day usually meant Leif waking up later than his usual photonically-dictated schedule. However, his was a homemade device somewhat more elaborate than your standard store-bought screamer in that it intelligently tracked both the time of sunrise and his heartbeat, and if the former led to no change in the latter, peaceful music would gently crescendo until he woke.
Perhaps most unusual about his living arrangement, though, was that he didn’t own a bed, and instead slept in a peach-coloured recliner. He described it, to those who asked, as a sort of fruity rocket ship that would launch him into daily life, and set against the baroque décor he had inherited from his grandparents, it certainly complemented the room’s aesthetic in much the same way that a rocket might. In truth, he had never described it that way to anyone because visitors to his home were exceedingly rare, and the delivery drivers and service people who occasionally entered - all of whom never failed to give it a second and third look, as though not fully convinced that it was really there - were polite enough not to ask. He was glad for this because launching into anything carried with it the implication that he moved swiftly and with purpose, and that wasn’t a concept he was too thrilled about. Leif, and his lie, remained fully-formed and dormant, until the situation warranted otherwise.
He sought above all else a quiet and peaceful morning, to float and bathe in a sea of golden light that illuminated every fibrous thread that surrounded him. Meet the world on your own terms, when you’re damn well good and ready, he’d think, wrapped in his white woolly blanket. Rising too swiftly or excitedly - merely announcing the goodness of the AM too near Leif’s ears, or in a manner too birdlike, or too close to first light - was considered nothing short of impudent, or at higher volumes, an act of war. Ostentatious displays of enthusiasm for what was essentially just another earthly rotation, were, he reckoned, vain attempts to distract one’s self from the wearying realisation that we’re all dying. It’s why you don’t see teenagers or eighty-year-olds in the gym or perfecting yoga poses. They’re either too young or too old to give a shit. It’s the in-between decades where the anxiety sets in; that knowledge your skin isn’t as taut as it once was, that magazine ads and clubs and music festivals are populated by the people that you used to be, that you’re headed blindly, inexorably, towards the horizon where there’s a hole in the ground with your name over it.
At least that’s what he used to tell his grandmother.
She would cackle and splutter at Leif’s darkly comical takes, never once giving him the condescending sad eyes his father would, or the reproachful responses his mother would. They didn’t understand.
He was, you might say, something of a cynic, but he tried his best not to judge. He understood everyone had their own road to walk, he only wished they’d wear quieter, less obnoxious shoes around him while doing so. Living alone, at any rate, he reasoned, spared him the burden of both high blood pressure and the inevitable interrogations as to why he was such a shit before (and after) breakfast.
It wasn’t ever something he planned on trying - the recliner, the window, etc., - much less continue doing for what had now been years. He had had trouble sleeping over a period of months, and the habit had formed from his attempts at late-night-television-as-sleep-therapy. But like a slice of white bread jammed and horribly contorted between revolving gears, he had found a semi-predictable, and semi-upright, peace. The bonus, if one could call it that (and he didn’t), was the relative ease with which he was able to propel himself into the day, since he was already somewhat vertical. The fact that the day he self-propelled into was one he frequently loathed wasn’t lost on him; it was a note he had mentally jotted down and stuck to the fridge door of his amygdala, and obscured beneath other more pressing matters, like bills, wedding invitations that required his rejection, and to-do lists that said things like ‘maybe fix the hot water system?’.
As he slowly woke on this overcast morning - thanks to Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 - his still-soft focus was caught by a giant green ball that drifted behind and out from the window frame. He blinked long as his pupils dilated to realise it was a hot-air balloon aloft outside the city. It was soon accompanied by two others, one in chequered black-and-white, and the other a brilliant blue-and-yellow that recalled the Swedish flag. This was - his groggy brain had the surprising wherewithal to think - the very embodiment of morning exhuberance; getting up and flying over the city in giant dirigibles. Own roads, own roads.
Far below, he watched Central Station commuters stride swiftly about, their discordant marching forming queues and bottlenecks that swelled with impatience before disappearing. He often observed this daily procession, eyeing their movements, pondering the destinations of those down there with their own daydreams and odd routines and, perhaps, recliners.
He enjoyed the feeling of stillness in the midst of motion, watching the world whirl about before him like a zoetrope, indulging in momentary delusions that he was in any way separate from it. In a real physical sense, time did move at a different rate here on the eighteenth floor than it did on the ground. Einstein may have married his cousin, he often said, but he was pretty smart. And sure, it wasn’t even trillionths of a second per year faster, but it was enough for Leif. He loved the idea that reality played funny buggers and held among its many parlour tricks a kind of temporal sleight-of-hand that we short-lived meat-creatures couldn’t see with our own eyes, and he took deep comfort in the thought. He had to. He had whiled away so many years in what one might very charitably call soul-searching, his only refuge was the shelter he took in relativity. Boy, he would think, the years go by like that.
Leif became aware of his slack-jawed staring, and shortened his vision to the fine dust that rested upon the window’s white louvres. He exhaled sharply in mild annoyance before realising he couldn’t remember when he had last cleaned it, and wondered whether anyone had ever automated a feather duster. He rose from his chair to fetch a cloth from the kitchen sink, but promptly forgot that too, and walked to the bathroom where he showered for exactly five minutes and fifteen seconds before - for the tenth time that month - his hot water ran cold, drawing from him the briefest scream.