“Up all night, sleep all day.”

I grasp for the location of this repeated melody as I fumble out of sleep and into a state of disorientation, the kind you experience when you wake up in your childhood bedroom years after you’ve escaped it. As I drift closer to consciousness, I realize the voice singing outside the door belongs to my dad.

He loved to sing this every Saturday morning to wake my sisters and me up if we dared to sleep past nine am.

And just like that, I’m sixteen again. I peel my eyes open to see the same walls I saw every morning of my teenage life — a black and white photograph of ballet dancers on point, a Smiths poster, a shelf with ceramic unicorns and a wooden incense burner.

My dad used to also call up his hungover friends on Saturday mornings with the same wake-up call. He’d been sober 15 years, high on nothing stronger than coffee or O’Douls.

“Boozers are losers,” he’d say in a sing-song voice to his beer-swilling buddies at parties.

“Rose, (our last name and what close friends call him), if I didn’t like you so much, I’d knock you out,” was a typical response to his heckling.

Yet, he was always offering us a beer. When we’d refuse with disgust, he’d justify himself with, “I like to use reverse psychology on you kids.”

He’d often report to anyone who’d listen, “Sophi started going to bars with me when she was a baby,” another tactic in the wheelhouse of this signature parenting method.
My mom has never fully corroborated his tales of these outings.

He stopped drinking at age 27, and I have to hand it to him, maintaining his sobriety while at parties amongst aforementioned boozer friends couldn’t have been easy. It helped that my mom joined him in solidarity for about seven of those years.

Anyway, time to face the literal music. I roll out of my peach-colored cotton eyelet lace comforter and throw on the same clothes I wore yesterday. Today is move day.