Adam Oster, Novelist

Harvey opened his eyes to the loud alarm sounding from his phone on his nightstand and looked at the clock through bleary eyes. It read 6:15am, a time that he had become accustomed to reading on his phone every morning, but that somehow didn’t get any easier every time he saw it.

It was early, and his night before had been long, and here he was, in the middle of this battle for his time between bed and life, trying to determine if there was an option for him to hit the snooze button and squeeze out just a couple more minutes of rest before he had to jump into his day.

He decided to throw caution to the wind, and he slid the slider on his phone to the right, lying back down on his pillow in the comfort of knowing that he could rest easy for the next ten minutes.

In what felt like a manner of seconds, his alarm sounded loudly again and he jolted awake, grumpy that his plan for more rest had merely resulted in him feeling even more groggy than he had during the previous few seconds he had of consciousness. He groaned loudly and slid off the bed, collapsing onto the ground.

“This is going to be a long day,” he thought to himself.

While Harvey didn’t have much that needed to get done with his day, the one thing is most absolutely required was for him to remain upright and awake. Working as a security guard at the mall meant there were very few options for him to simply close his eyes and doze off for a couple of minutes. And since he had been working double shifts for the past few weeks, doing both the overnights and the daytime guard shifts, he felt more like a zombie than a human.

If only he could simply take some time to get away. Not to actually go anywhere, but to his warm-ish bed. To a place where he could simply dream away his days.

If only retirement were an actual option for him, he thought. Maybe I should have done a better job of saving up for retirement, but I guess that would have meant I would have had some extra cash I could use for saving.

Harvey dreamed about a life lived much more comfortably, one in which he could actually talk about his 401k and all it was doing for his future, instead of being a man who spent most of his waking hours thinking about how great it was going to be when he could get back to sleep.

Harvey was tired. And Harvey didn’t know any other way of life than to be tired.