Awake: I Remember
nah nah nah ahh ahhh ah
Woke up this morning with a memory of my 6-year-old self, triggered by the crisp San Francisco morning:
I remember waking up around 7 a.m., always like clockwork because my father had to leave for work. Before I got out of bed, I checked the secret hole I had carved into my mattress, a private vault where I stashed candy and snacks. The inventory was always intact because I never ate anything. I don’t know why my anxiety triggered that ritual, but somehow, it made the world make sense.
Next came my camel brown wedge knee-high boots—their hollow soles always seemed to collect little rocks and gravel like souvenirs from my small wanderings around the school blacktop. I would pair them with warm leggings, a mini skirt, and a simple top—a child’s version of armor for the unpredictable world of elementary school. Outside my window, the world was foggy and wet, the street blurred under sheets of drizzle and shades of blue and dark green. My room itself is hard to fully remember. I only recall the mattress hole and the looming shadow of a tall, heavy dresser I struggled to move alone.
I’d say goodbye to my brothers as my father’s voice, edged with impatience, called me to hurry before he was late. The world outside tasted crisp and electric…the kind of fresh morning air that feels like biting into an apple: sharp, clean, alive. Knowing I’m alive again while walking to the car is renewing. Climbing into my father’s old black Ford Focus, my feet would sink into a nest of crumpled fast food bags, old mail, candy and snack wrappers—the debris of long commutes and late-night shifts.
But there was something about those drives that pierced me even then. My father had the best, most diverse playlist—a rotating sermon of beats, melodies, and coded wisdom. And every morning, without fail, he started the ride with Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. The first time I heard it, I didn’t understand it. I remember asking him what it meant.
He told me:
“The world won’t get no better if we just let it be. We gotta change it, just you and me.”
I was young enough to believe he was speaking directly to me. And maybe he was. My father was a doctor—a man who, from my view in the passenger seat, was living the lyrics. The song said, wake up all the doctors, time to heal a new way, and I thought: He’s doing God’s work.
And he was. But he also wasn’t.
As I grew older, I saw what I couldn't see then: my father was caught in the very machine the song was calling us to wake up from. The system had lifted him out of poverty, helped him buy our first home, and put food on the table. But it also dressed him in its credentials, handed him his white coat, and extracted his hours, his passion, and his fire in exchange for his soul. Society turned him into one of its priests—pimped out by the very structures that pretend to serve while feeding themselves. The song’s melody may have touched his heart, but it never broke into his mind. It never disrupted his universe.
There were other songs on those car rides, but none that etched themselves into me like that one. Wake Up Everybody was the first time I realized a song can be both a lullaby and an alarm. It was my first understanding that I didn’t want to live asleep. I didn’t want melodies to soothe me into inaction. The heart can stir, the body can move—but if the mind stays sleeping, nothing changes.
And so I made a quiet promise that morning—watching the rain smear across the window, watching my father trapped in his routine year after year—that I would learn how to wake myself up. That I would not use beauty as anesthesia to numb reality, but as a call to act, to create my own universe. If you don’t know what you’re asleep to, you’ll never know how to wake yourself up.
