The Committee That Decides How I Feel Today

There is a committee that decides how I feel each day, and I have never been allowed in the room. They meet overnight, while I sleep, in a chamber I cannot find, and by morning the decision is already made and entirely final. I just wake up and learn the verdict by standing up.

I have tried to lobby them. I submit my petitions in the form of good behavior, the way you'd leave an offering and hope. A reasonable bedtime. Water. A gentle day with no overreach. The right food, the slow walk, the early lights-out. I do everything the pamphlets suggest, file it all carefully before midnight, and trust that a well-prepared case will be rewarded.

It is not rewarded. The committee reviews my flawless submission and rules, for no stated reason, that tomorrow will be fog with a side of flare. Other nights I do everything wrong, stay up too late, push too hard, skip the water entirely, and wake to a clear and generous day handed to me like a gift I did not earn. There is no correlation. I have looked for the correlation for years. The committee does not work in correlations. The committee works in moods.

They keep no minutes. This is the part that gets me. I cannot review the reasoning, cannot appeal the decision, cannot even confirm a decision was made rather than a coin flipped. I wake up and take my inventory, slowly, the way you read a letter you already suspect is bad news. How do the legs feel. How clear is the head. Is the door going to stick today. The verdict reveals itself in the first few minutes of being upright, and then that is the day, ratified, no further discussion.

I have made a kind of peace with the committee, the way you make peace with weather or with city hall. I still file my petitions every night, not because they work, but because the filing is the one part of the process I control. The decision was never mine. The bedtime is. So I leave my small offerings, I turn out the light, and I let the committee do whatever it does in that room I will never see, and I find out who I am tomorrow when I stand up.