Gold Day. Formerly A Day. Day 44.

I broke through sleep like a drowning man breaks the surface of the water. Gasping and terrified and then silence.

Eventually the cold Doberman nose of my life partner Sybil, tapped out a staccato on my temple. It was 4:30 am. Obviously that is long enough to wait for a cold can of dog food. I also gave her something to eat.

I spent a great deal of time making coffee. French roast with chicory. The temperature has to be just right. I brewed it, poured it in a thermos and left it on my kitchen table. With my phone.

First period entered the classroom like migrating caribou, or some sort of land salmon. They immediately assaulted me about their grades. "Give me a make up test or I'll call Mom's for Liberty and tell them you let me read a book! Without prior approval!"

"Slander" I shouted back at them but they just kept insisting. I was unable to access Canvas, or Pinnacle because of my lost phone, and now these overgrown tartigrades were extorting me! I told them I could work from home and they mocked me and asked if the ice machine behind the Seven Eleven even had internet, and since it probably doesn't, how would I be able to work?

They continued to shout orders at me, and they were so overcome with their own sense of pompous righteousness they never saw the tear that I was saving for a future sadness. Spent too soon, the sadness had come for me now. My students, although they were just beasts build of negative emotion and many bags of Takis, had been let down.

For I was the one at fault. It was my dereliction that allowed them to miss the bus on quiz days, and fall asleep before the homework had been turned in. Truly I was more beast than man, my soul crawled like a disembodied husk onto the sands of disappointment where it would dry up and blow away and no one would remember it had ever been there at all. I had forgotten it existed years ago.