All day you kept glancing at the little glowing numbers on the nightstand, the way a sailor watches weather. 6:45, you set it. You said the word "have to" out loud, twice, to the empty room. I collected that word. It has a weight I can use.
Here is what I will do with the clock. It will ring, yes, but the sound will be your grandmother calling you in from a yard you have not stood in for thirty years, and the numbers on its face will spell a street name instead of a time, and you will need to get there, and you will be neither late nor on time because both will have stopped applying.
The snooze button you slap at every morning without waking will become a small warm animal that lives in your palm. When you press it, it will press back.
I saw the thing underneath the "have to," which you did not quite see: you are not afraid of the morning. You are afraid there is no time in it that belongs only to you. So I will give you a long one. A whole afternoon of nothing scheduled, in a house with too many staircases, and the clock will be there on a table, unplugged, harmless, showing no numbers at all.
You will pick it up and it will be light as a leaf, and you will understand, in the way you only understand things here, that it was never the one in charge.
Then it rings for real, and the light comes gray under the blinds, and I thin out like breath on glass. You will not remember the grandmother or the warm animal or the leaf. That is all right.
I was only ever going to last until you needed to stand up.