Morning Dread

by Dawn Downey

The front door slammed behind me, echoing through the house. Home from the last day of third grade, I shouted for my mom. She didn’t answer. I ran upstairs to peek out my bedroom window. In the back yard, a half empty laundry basket lay on its side beneath the clothesline—pajamas strewn like corpses on the grass. I pressed my forehead against the screen and looked in all directions. The buckeye tree that we used for third base rustled in the hot breeze. When the front door opened, I expected to hear my brothers yell up the stairs. But the door closed softly. The dead bolt slid into place. A heavy footfall landed on the bottom step. Another followed. I held my breath. The fourth stair squeaked. Then silence. I crawled into the back of the closet and buried myself under a pile of dirty clothes. The floor outside my bedroom door creaked once, then again. And I woke up.
I always woke up at that point. Familiar surroundings came into focus and the fear receded. Until the next night. When I was in grade school, I dreaded going to sleep.
Now I dread waking up. As soon as the eyes open in the morning, while the mind is calm, I notice a barely discernable, yet unmistakable, disquiet in the belly. Dread.
I lay motionless to examine it. The slightest twitch of a finger troubles its still dark waters. As I watch it, I have the oddest feeling that it’s staring back.
It differs from other fears that call on me.
Depression visited in my twenties, after a traumatic breakup. My mother described reaching out for me through that despair, as talking to someone at the other end of a tunnel. Fear locked me away from lunch dates, job interviews and family gatherings. A therapist was the only person I hazarded a relationship with.
Morning dread does not imprison me. It’s a feral cat stalking the edge of a dark road.
Stage fright calls when I speak in front of a group. Knees quiver. Nerves jump. Acid stomach rages. Two days before the event, I accuse the reflection in the mirror. Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into. One-day prior, I consider calling in sick because, really, I am. I spend the final hours in the bathroom or racing for the bathroom.
Morning Dread has no jumping nerves, or flopping stomach. No signs of life at all. It’s the dead air left in the wake of a lover’s abrupt exit.
Height phobia accompanied a visit to a roadside oddity. Before it was retired, Big Brutus, an 11 million pound, sixteen-story shovel, had excavated coal by scooping up house-sized chunks of earth. I climbed four stories of narrow metal stairs along the outside of the behemoth to explore its cavernous engine room. Preparing for the return trip to the ground, I poked my head out of the door I’d entered. On realizing how high up I was, I gasped and prepared to spend the rest of my life inside Big Brutus. Since a backwards climb was the only way down, I stuck my foot out behind me. It dangled above the ground searching for the top step. I felt I was on the edge of a roof, taking one step backwards into thin air.
Unlike Big Brutus, morning dread doesn’t panic me into immobility. She’s a black widow, seducing me across her web.
I discovered omniscient fear while on retreat in West Virginia. Each day, I walked the forest road that ran in front of the monastery grounds. I turned right at the end of the driveway. Then realized I’d grown afraid to turn left. When a dog barked three houses down an intersecting street, I retreated and went in the opposite direction. The walk ended each day at the same sharp curve in the mountain highway, because I was afraid to go around the bend.
But morning dread is not afraid to turn this way or that. There is no turning. It only sits, as still and dark as four a.m.
Its silence leaves questions unanswered. Who is creeping up the stairs for me? A stranger lumbering ever closer with fist clenched? A trusted loved one about to crash through the bedroom door to ravage my innocent heart? Or those faceless triplets -hunger, poverty and failure? Trapped in the nightmare, I hunker down inside the closet of my imagined safety—unable to claim my real life.
But morning dread fears no particular monster. It appears before I’m afraid to starve or fail. Even before I’m afraid to love, there is simply afraid. Morning dread reveals itself as this primordial ooze from which the first I-thought springs. Without it, there can be no I.
Afraid transforms a budding ego into a verdant garden, where manicured pathways meander through fragrant preferences. Juicy decisions sweeten on the vine and colorful opinions bloom in the sun. All maintained with backbreaking labor. If I rest, it all returns to its natural state.
If I stop tilling my thoughts, I rest in awareness, my natural state. I am the pure awareness that enfolds everything, including morning dread. Released from the mind’s limitations, I am infinite—awareness watching itself. In my natural state, my true feelings flourish. I call them compassion, joy, and peace. My authentic spirit blossoms. I call it innocence. My real life flourishes. I call it freedom.