The Night I Woke Up

The dead don't always stay buried. Sometimes they show up at 7:45 AM on a Tuesday, wearing a suit and tie, shuffling toward the elevator with bloodshot eyes and a half-empty coffee cup. That's what David had become—not a literal zombie, but something worse: a man who'd forgotten how to be alive.

I knew the feeling. We were both running on fumes, running toward deadlines that kept multiplying, running away from the question we'd both been avoiding: when had we stopped living?

"You look like hell," I told him at the office Thanksgiving party three years ago.

He laughed, but it was hollow. "That's just the corporate reanimation process. They extract your soul somewhere around year three."

Now I stood outside his apartment at midnight, rain soaking through my coat, waiting for him to buzz me in. We hadn't spoken since the layoff rumors started circulating. Since his wife left with the kids and the house. Since he stopped showing up to work altogether.

When I finally knocked, the door opened on its own.

The apartment was dark. No furniture. Just David sitting on the floor with a bottle of bourbon, staring out the window where lightning fractured the sky—sudden, violent, beautiful.

"I forgot about storms," he said, not turning around. "Did you know I spent thirty years in this city and never once watched a storm?"

I sat beside him. The bourbon bottle sat between us like an accusation.

"She said I was already dead," David continued. "That she couldn't spend another night with a man who'd forgotten how to feel anything."

I'd been there. We all had. The slow death of compromise. The zombie state of going through motions until the motions became the only reality you knew.

Lightning illuminated his face—hollowed out, yes, but finally, finally, something human in his eyes. Pain was better than numbness. At least pain meant you were still alive to feel it.

"I'm done running," he said.

Outside, thunder shook the windows. The storm had been building for hours, and finally it was breaking. All that pressure, all that heat, finally finding its release.

"Good," I said. "Now what?"

David set down the bottle and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in years.

"Now I remember what lightning looks like."