waking up

I get tired of the Hollywood cliche of waking up with a start, sweating and naked in bed. First of all, I never sleep naked. Gross. Second, I've never woken up by sitting straight up in bed, even before my back got bad. So, instead of being part of the problem, here's an attempt to be the solution. Also, just to prove that all the time I spend on my laptop is not just organizing my mp3s.

1. Her eyes popped open, only to immediately be scratched by the accumulated sleep from the long night. She worked for a good minute wiping all of it away, looking like a small child because of the angle her elbows made as she used both hands.
   
2. A dull thud echoed within him, and lifted the sleep from his heavy head. He looked at his left hand in time to see the growing bruise; his glasses, book, and cold medicine lay flat on the nightstand, still shaking from the collision.
   
3. He touched her hand, and felt the world spin faster, as if to make up for creeping so slowly before. The walls faded into the familiar dull white of his attic bedroom, as he finally heard the blare of his alarm. His body felt painfully cold and uncomfortable as his consciousness slowly warmed up all of the connections to his limbs.
   
4. She snapped her phone closed to eliminate the noisy threat of her alarm, gently rolling away from the clamor to seek new comfort on the other side of the bed.
   
5. The last thing she remembered was the steadily more violent bump-bump of the train as it entered the mountains. The bumps not only shook the entire car, but were accompanied by thin shrieks and whirls of color. Carefully, unsteadily peeking through her bangs on the safe side of her blankets, the shrieks and whirls magically blurred into her nieces pogosticking up and up and down and down on her bed, teling her that Christmas morning had (technically) arrived.