Alarm Clock

Finch stared into the slowly heating mixture of sauce and vegetables he had shaken out of the take-out container and into the pot. A train began hurtling across the tracks adjacent to the building he lived in. Whether the reheated food was moving because of the train shaking the apartment, or whether it was a sign that it had been in the fridge too long was beyond him. He muttered something about having an early morning the next day as the roaring of the train disappeared in the distance. The heat was shifting the vegetables around on the thin layer of sauce. It made him uncomfortable, but seeing as he hadn't found the time to eat properly that day, he just covered the pot with a lid and left the stove to sit at the two-person dining table, half of which was covered by resealable bags of nuts, dried fruit and cereal. Things one could eat straight out of the bag, without having to do dishes afterwards.

Outside the window, voices began filtering in from the adjacent apartments and the street below, barely loud enough to be murmurs above the hissing of the stove.

He absent-mindedly fingered open a half-empty bag of salted cashews and started picking at the insides. The world outside began waking up, just as he was preparing to end his day, after catching up on all those things a human needed to do to stay alive for a sustained amount of time. When the reheated food looked palatable again, he gobbled it down, almost entirely ignoring the taste. So far into a string of days that each had been longer than twenty hours, food had become just sustenance, just as water and coffee had become merely hydration and caffeine, each of which Finch believed he needed, but had long since lost the willingness or ability to enjoy or appreciate. He was certain, were breathing not a reflex, he would have reduced that to a subsistence minimum as well.

The horizon beyond the crowded city skyline was coloured peach by the sunrise, unseen from Finch's kitchen window. Finch was lying face-down on the sofa that had been the less comfortable replacement for a proper bed since at least the beginning of the previous month. The analogue alarm clock - a remnant of his education days that had only recently regained its position of the tyrannical mover that it had previously held - was ticking along, mercilessly continuing an audible, but non-specific countdown toward Finch's next shift. He blinked into his pillow, trying to ignore the sounds outside, running so counter to what he was trying to achieve. He glanced sideways, past the risen portion of the pillow on the side of his head. It had been several weeks since he had turned his alarm clock facing away, to stave off the dread of watching the seconds tick by, and cutting whatever limited sleep he was supposed to get down even further. It had replaced this very concrete dread with the less concrete one of not knowing entirely. He had found that keeping his eyes closed and waiting for sleep to come was not a reliable strategy, neither was staring down his phone, or a book until either his mind or his body shut off. Instead, staying in place, letting his mind wander, increasingly sluggish, until boredom slowly lowered him into sleep seemed like the quickest method for him. In exchange, he found the process agonizingly unpleasant. Finch lay there, on his face, shutting out the day-light intruding through his curtains along with the sounds of the rush-hour traffic, but this time, he was just about too tired to properly fall asleep. He turned on his back, and reached for the alarm clock to shut off the alarm. Maybe it was about time to call it quits. He could call in sick, or quite outright, and both options would have the same result, though delayed by the time of about a week. But he could finally sleep, and return to the regular life. It seemed like a wonderful proposition, though truthfully, he wasn't sure what he was going to do with the time he would have regained. He imagined briefly that he could find a regular job, perhaps not paid as well, but with the bonus of regaining his time, a social life, perhaps even a family life, should he get enough practice in the former. Financially speaking, he wasn't just scraping by, especially because he didn't really have the time or the opportunity to do much with the money he did earn at the end of the month. If he had to, he could probably downsize still, move into a smaller place. Not necessarily in a less affluent neighborhood - he did consider himself as having standards - but just giving up on one room would likely save him the money he spent on food. Then again, he could imagine that if he were to try at returning to a regular sleep schedule, try at regaining a social life, he might well fail. In that case giving up the money he was being compensated with might not have been worth it. After all, he did know what he signed up for when he took the job all those months ago. It had seemed like fair compensation back then. Of course he hadn't known about the difficulties surrounding everything even related to sleep, but whether that was enough to tip the scales, he wasn't too sure. It suddenly seemed like a lot of work, reshouldering the responsibility of regular social interactions, along with the added weight of clawing himself into a position he had never really been fond of, and then, as he weighed the measures of effort of quitting, to continuing, it began to feel more and more feasible to just switch the alarm back on, and go back to sleep. He did feel tired enough now, to leverage the few hours left before he would have to return to work. He could just lie down and take back up the momentum. A path that, while easier, he understood would be harder to abandon the longer he had traveled it. Finch had made his decision quickly after, and either way he knew that part of him would be disappointed by whichever choice he made. He placed the alarm clock on the top of the shelf, face-down.