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It came like a flood that morning.

The day had broken and been broken, and the sun danced in fragments against his soiled walls. The golden rainbow light was split up and divided and skewed by the glass that lay together in his window, and the entire room was sleepy. It was a morning akin to any other morning on any other day in a row of a countless others, and there was nothing remarkable to be said about it; the room in which he slept was akin to any other room in any other sullied downtown apartment, and there was nothing remarkable to be said about it. The bed was just a bed, and beneath a pile of bundled sheets lay a heavy body akin to any other heavy body. There was nothing remarkable to be said for him. He moved quietly in his slumber, rolling from stomach, to side, to back, until his heavy-lidded eyes would open to feast hungrily on the cracks in his ceiling. They closed again.

To be born is much like waking up. The first big shift in feeling comes only in the moment that you begin to leave the embryonic sac of fluid or dead air, to enter what will become your life or the beginning of your day. You exit wailing. You feel safe until you’re not, and that is the first obstacle.