Waking up to the same ear-piercing, screechy alarm for the third time this week.

She turns to her clock: 6:00 A.M.

She rolls over, hoping for a “good morning” from her husband, but is utterly desensitized to his silence. 

She slips on Ugg slippers she can’t afford and walks down the creaky staircase of her two-story suburban home.

She grabs the drug-store creamer and milk from the refrigerator to make the same coffee she looks forward to every A.M. as she waits for her two children—one boy and one girl—to disrupt the calmness of her morning.

The kids wake up late and are rushing to get out the door— 

they miss the bus, but she is too tired to show frustration.

She, still in her slippers, rushes to get herself ready for a long day of nothingness.

A skirt, a button-up blouse, and some plain black work shoes call her name—as they do every morning. 

She chooses to keep up with the trend of not saying goodbye to her fatigued husband who has pressed ‘snooze’ for the third time today.

She grabs the keys to the family minivan and slams the old, rigid doors shut with such force that shakes the musty blue car.

She waves her kids goodbye as she pulls out of the middle-school roundabout to drive aimlessly to her nine-to-five desk job at the exact office she has been working at for the past ten years.

She forcefully has uncomfortable conversations with her co-workers—the same co-workers she’s had for a decade—on her lunch break, sipping on her black coffee out of a standard, slightly-discolored, office-provided mug. 

Five o’clock rolls around; she logs off her computer and grabs her keys and coat from the community coat rack at the front desk.

She drives home, ten-and-two, staring straight ahead, emotionless

until she pulls into the driveway in her identical-house neighborhood in the small town where everyone knows everyone but are clueless to who people really are. 

Her neighbor, bringing in groceries, gives her a hoax of a wave to greet her—

She waves back.

She, her work clothes and all, opens the garage door and heads straight up to her not-so-master master bedroom, curls in a ball under her shared, scratchy covers, and stops.

She stops to think—to realize:

She’s living the life she’s always feared to live as the woman she has always feared to become.

Sigh.