thank you notes 9/20

i'm thankful that i forgot to set my alarm last night and so we woke up twenty five minutes after it should have gone off. i'm thankful that's okay because we have a cushion built into the morning and the only casualty is that i have a bit less time than usual to write these notes to you. i'm thankful that these days i usually sleep all the way to my alarm, that i wake, hazily, to the soft chimes of apple's "bulletin" alarm sound, which i have decided after much review is the one i prefer. i'm thankful for my nightly dose of amitryptiline, which is the thing that has made it possible for me to sleep all the way to my alarm. i'm thankful for this, very much, since in the past, for years, when my stomach hurt or i was very stressed out or for no "reason" at all, i almost always woke up before my alarm, sometimes long before, and wouldn't be able to go back to sleep, meaning that i then had to wait there alone in the dark for a long time for the day to begin. i'm thankful to remember, in those circumstances, how i would be so grateful when it was finally officially "time to get up" and have breakfast and i could put the unpleasantness of the night behind me. i'm thankful that this was one of the reasons i so loved my breakfast bowl of cereal, as a symbol that i was back in the light instead of the pre-dawn world where bad thoughts and feelings, nourished by darkness, would plague me badly. i'm thankful now to be able to love my breakfast bowl of cereal for what it is instead of what it represents. i'm thankful for the way that the chocolate cereal turns the milk chocolate and for the bit of that milk left in the bottom of the bowl after i've eating the cereal. i'm thankful, every day, to drink that sweetness.