I Asked For This

By John Popko / Fall 2025

Part I

The alarm whines at 6:00 a.m. I hate it. I hate mornings. I negotiated against them for years and still lost. But I asked for this—when I asked the woman breathing softly beside me to marry me, and to build a life where both of us can be happy. I slide out of bed like a burglar stealing my own sleep, tiptoe past the creaks, and race the clock we both keep breaking. Outfit staged. Cold brew over coffee—speed over warmth. Iʼm shaving seconds, stacking tiny efficiencies like sandbags against the flood of morning traffic.

The freeway waits. If you’re not early enough, it’s not a road; it’s a theme park ride called “Stand Still,ˮ a metal conga line sponsored by Sisyphus. If I beat the worst of it, I win nothing—just the right to be on time. “This is water,ˮ I tell myself, the troubled and brilliant David Foster Wallace whispers to me. I grin at the grimness. I asked for this.

Campus appears. After my first class, I have ten minutes to get to a building Iʼm told is twenty-two. I sprint, backpack thumping a metronome on my spine. In class, I sit and pretend my lungs are not filing a complaint. I stay present, I take notes, I do the simple prayer of adulthood: show up, shut up, write things down. Between lectures, I juggle work—robotic email responses, drafts for articles, edits that breed edits. I move from task to task to task like a street performer with too many torches, smiling so no one notices my hair on fire.

Some days I wait out traffic at school, chasing the sun as it sets on Santee and Lakeside. Other days I have to bolt—family, errands, a surprise obligation that comes labeled “URGENTˮ by someone else’s anxiety. Back on the freeway, I inch forward, then slam the brakes when a Nissan Altima forgets physics. Audiobook on. Patience off. This is water. That’s easy: when you’re drowning, you never forget it.

Home is not rest; home is a gym for responsibilities. I cook. I clean. I flatten the prison fortress of cardboard where our “new lifeˮ arrives in Amazon stamped coffins. I lug donations down the hall and drag up the hall, the perpetual migration of a household inventing itself. I sign wedding thank-you cards until my handwriting degrades into hieroglyphics. I move furniture an inch to the left so the room and I can finally exhale. My wife rides the night, and I try to be her ballast when the anxiety winds pick up. I am a rock performing rock cosplay—granite on the outside, egg on the inside. Still, I hold.

When the apartment quiets, my mind does not. Questions climb onto the bed. Does she truly love me the way I love her? Will the money and time Iʼm pouring into school and work harden into a better life? What happens if the economy goes kaput? Fair questions, yes, but they press me back under the surface.

Other nights, gratitude floats me. I think of younger me in New York working to make money for my family—writing on the side to build a more fulfilling and prosperous life—and the memory arrives in present tense because my body still remembers. He cooks in the boiling kitchens at 3:00 a.m., forearms tattooed by pots that don’t apologize. He cancels the gym because the walk-in’s steam is the only sauna he can afford. He keeps a beat-up laptop in a locker and writes on breaks, then on the subway, then in the thin margin between exhaustion and sleep. He drowns in the dark, murky water of the city, and he swims anyway.

Now I am in San Diego water. It’s still water—still dangerous—but it’s clearer. The currents are prettier, the temperature kinder, the lifelines nearer. I hold my wife’s hand and feel both of us relax by degrees. I set alarms I hate for a life I love. The routine is monotonous and stressful, yes, but the direction is clear.

Before sleep finally elbows the questions aside, it comes to me once again. I asked for this.

And Iʼm damn glad I did.

Part II

He wakes at six. The room is dim, the apartment quiet, his wife asleep. He moves with rehearsal: clothes staged, cold brew gulped, door eased shut. Up close, the morning shows in small diagnostics—red-rimmed eyes, tight shoulders, a jaw that sets before he speaks. The body reads like a ledger of tiny costs: sleep shaved to fit two schedules, commute-induced micro-spikes of adrenaline, a baseline hum of vigilance that never fully powers down.

On the freeway, he sits forward, one hand at twelve o’clock, the other hovering near the turn signal. The face cycles through irritation and self-correction. He listens to nonfiction related to his classes, less for pleasure than to make the hour pass his classes. Physiologically, the routine nudges his nervous system toward chronic alert; cognitively, the toggling—brake, glance, merge, absorb—trains attention to splinter. By the time he reaches campus, he’s warmed up for a day of switching contexts.

Among students, he blends in until the sprint begins. A mapping app underestimates distance; he compensates with legs and lungs. In lecture, he scans, types, replies. Between classes, he drafts and edits articles on a laptop that never quite cools. The work looks sedentary but lands as strain: neck tilt, shallow breaths, a tightness between shoulder blades he rolls against the edge of a chair. By noon, focus comes in bursts. He fuels on convenience—whatever is close, fast, and cheap—then returns to the stack. The outputs are measurable: pages read, words filed. The wear is harder to count, but visible.

At home, the system changes, not the logic. He breaks down shipping boxes from a recent wedding, rearranges furniture by inches, wipes counters he already wiped. Domestic labor doubles as regulation: the rhythm steadies him; the tidiness promises control. His wife names her anxieties; he meets them with quiet, steady responses. He is good at this—at softening a room, at making decisions smaller, at keeping tone calm. The empathy is genuine and costly. You can see the drawdown in his posture after she goes to bed.

The routine’s footprint extends beyond the apartment. The university benefits from a student who is also a worker; his tuition and labor feed the same machine. The platforms he uses to navigate and communicate parse his time into monetizable fragments, shift error onto the user, harvest the residue of movement and search. The logistics chain ensures that a change in life status arrives as cardboard and plastic he’ll flatten at night. He is not an outlier. He is a representative unit: an educated striver whose minutes are traded across institutions that rarely coordinate but always collect.

Lingering tension, shallow sleep, a pulse that overreacts to minor disruptions. On the mind: a practiced readiness that borders on hypervigilance, attention sliced into tabs, a fatigue that feels more computational than muscular. The couple’s resilience is co-produced, a shared technology that requires regular maintenance.

He writes most days—reported pieces, analysis, columns no one will cite in a century. He knows this. His face doesn’t fall at the thought. The pleasure sits elsewhere. It shows in the slight lift of his eyebrows when an interview subject surprises him with an angle he hadn’t considered; in the half-smile when his editor’s margin note catches a lazy sentence and kicks the paragraph into shape; in the steadying quiet after he files, when the room seems to exhale. The exchanges—the back-and-forth with sources, the tug and tighten with an editor—are the work, not the brand name of the publication or the spike on a traffic chart.

Late, the apartment rests. He scrolls less than he stares, phone dimmed, ceiling mapped by memory. The questions return—money, time, the future—but they do not dominate. He looks over at his wife, asleep, and the nervous system that spent the day braced for impact softens, finally. Not because the systems have stopped extracting, but because the meaning has reasserted itself: family, partnership, a home that looks less temporary each week.

From the outside, the routine reads as throughput; up close, it registers as care. The articles will disappear into archives, the commutes into traffic models, the minutes into aggregates. A century from now, most of his words will be unread and unchanged. It doesn’t matter. The days are full—of work done with attention, of conversations that teach him something, of love that returns him to himself. To explore the seas in a single droplet, that's what it's all about.