My Mer de Feu came early in the morning. I ate breakfast because I can enjoy it only on days like this. Usually, I find mornings too abrasive and confrontational with their eminence and expectations to enjoy anything at all throughout their duration, and this is why I usually sleep as long as possible during it. However, without blessed sleep, there was nothing else with which I could fill the void.

Oh, I certainly tried to sleep--in fact, even when it was inevitable that I wouldn't have any, sometime around 5:10, I still attempted to race with dawn. Only two or three precious hours before I’m at the cusp of just made it and kind of late, and then I needed to blur my way into the subway, where things slow down just long enough to get a whiff of someone’s early morning armpits and coffee breath before work. I was truly in no rush to submit to this daily ritual just preceding a workday full of have to’s and accented with dreams of riding my bike along the edge of Jersey and Pennsylvania (like I did for a week that one summer while she was at that Christian retreat and I took some Jewish personal time).

Hence, it was very important that I take advantage of the little pre-morning I had left. I didn't care how futile it was to attempt to sleep with so little time left until morning -- I knew I wouldn't be rested, but at least for these last few precious moments, I wouldn't be conscious. Nonetheless, my rebellion against sleeplessness only resulted in a glorious battle between my tenacity and dawn’s encroaching inevitability. Even once her artillery of sun rays finally breached my barricade of curtains and flooded my room, I was barely willing to accept that defeat was even possible.

As I drowned in the lemony light, I tried to shield myself with sheets and pillows in a valiant attempt to take on daylight single-handedly. Indeed, it all felt so valiant until I wasn’t even granted the glory of martyrdom, but instead left staring anticlimactically at the growing swell of light in my bedroom until laying became uncomfortable and I was forced to sit up.

The day had won.

Once I finally acknowledged this indelibility, I freed my senses enough to notice that something was distinctly awry and it further disquieted my already jilted and foggy state of mind.

It was the bed, the room, then surrounding rooms, and suddenly my entire apartment felt strange and foreign. It took me at least a minute and a half (I would imagine, but however long, an eternity nonetheless) to realize that it was due to a certain emptiness—the sort of abstracted absence that can only be described by comparison, like one's fleeting essence evidencing death in one's eyes. That certain je ne sais quoi that humanity is yet to conceive, but can perceive its lack.

Anyway, the apartment entertained that now. It was highly upsetting, and it jarred me to… my essence, if I can clearly identify it while its still present. Suffice to say that every part of me, acknowledged or not, thoroughly tasted my sudden isolation, and it was nauseating. The headache from the night before returned and I was suddenly dizzy.

The day was not done.

Now more distinct sensations assailed me. I realized how quiet it was—as though sound itself was patiently waiting for a provoked day’s temperament to calm before arriving. The rest of my senses followed suit in reporting an awkward emptiness to which I was unaccustomed. To sum it up, I had somehow woken up in a completely different existence without first going to sleep. And now it became clear that this was, among whatever else, a lesson in inevitability. How motherly of you, Mother Day. Now how about some good news or reassurance for once?

But supportive parenting went out of style with the advent of Death Metal, Gangster Rap, and party drugs. Now we only have the invaluable lessons of contradiction, impatience, bitterness, and inequity.

And the vicious cycle continues, because I do love night more.

But I digress.

In every person’s life, there’s a series of climaxes. They’re not unlike narrative and cinematic climaxes, although life tends to be a little less contrived than your everyday artistic expression.

Or, perhaps, more unruly than your common human abstraction and its idealistic templates. Indeed, life will shirk on devices like the "build" in favor of jarring spectators and characters in a sudden climax not unlike premature ejaculation, completely disregarding whether the person experiencing such circumstances even understands the plot or whatever happens from then on.

A journalist’s nightmare indeed, reality is, which is another reason why we rarely report all of it all at once.

Nonetheless, climaxes do occur, and I’m submitting to you that these climax have types. And these… “types”, depend on the brand of person they result from, or how he or she lives his or her life.

I happen to be the type that has what’s known as Mer de Feus. Much like an essence, I couldn’t really describe them, but only intimate a similar or opposing situation to exemplify it by proxy -- such as an artful allusion to Hell in a pretty language. And I present to you my life, splayed open like legs, and can you forgive the vulnerability in my tone?

This, I knew immediately, was a Mer de Feu. This abusively hyperbolic emptiness. The silence that’s so fucking silent that my thoughts echo. The sweat that feels like my whole body has been rubbed with isopropyl alcohol. The emotions assailing my face in various manifestations, all over; my ears and cheeks and nose burning as the latter floods and drools, my mouth drying and my saliva thickening and foaming, my eyes stinging and leaking salt water, everything stinging, hot, and salty.

She was gone.