Hibernating Sucks!

Amy Sea
3 min readSep 15, 2020

Can We Go Outside Now?

Photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash

I’m a new bear. A reincarnated bear. It’s irrelevant who I was before because I’ve retained nothing except the inability to understand my next move.

All the bears are talking and I’m nodding, like being a bear is a perfectly normal thing. Then, this one bear mentions hibernation. Even when I was, whatever I was before, hibernation terrified me.

And like all fear, I feel exposed. I feel like a reporter from the liberal media who shows up at a Trump rally by mistake. I’ve got to be careful what I ask because who knows how much it hurts when a bear punches you in the face?

I’ve got to find out more about hibernation.

For instance, how am I supposed to hibernate when I’ve been up all night watching Netflix, trying not to think about the end of the world? My circadian rhythms are totally off-kilter. Incidentally, my blinds are also broken, so my windows are bare, so when the sun is awake, I am awake.

A drunk old bear takes me under his alcohol umbrella. He tells me that before the hibernating starts, I’ll need to invest in some blackout blinds. But I worry. The mail being what it is, will my blinds arrive in time? What if one of DeJoy’s lackeys thinks my blinds are Democratic voting ballots and disappears them? And even if they get here in time, the mail thieves will steal them off my porch before I get my Amazon alert that they’ve been delivered.

But I just keep nodding, acting like it’s perfectly normal to get advice from someone who is so saturated in alcohol, that when he lights a cigarette half the forest burns down.

There are other worries about falling asleep around a bunch of bears you just met. No one in our sleuth is showing any obvious party affiliation. What if I start hibernating and the Ever-Trump bears murder me and my affiliates to suppress our votes? I wonder if it obvious I’m a Biden Bear? Maybe I should take that Never Again Trump sign out of my window. And, what if I wake up and I’m Russian? I don’t ask that. I ask the politically neutral questions.

What if I have to go to the bathroom? I ask the drunk bear.

You don’t.

I don’t?

No. You’re not eating. You’re not drinking.

Won’t I dehydrate? Won’t I starve? His eye-rolls are palpable, teenage-girl grade.

Think about it, he says. You’re not sweating. You’re not roaring. You’re just a lump. Physiologically, you’ve got different needs.

Slothness is an appealing state of being. I wonder if it’s like that time I shattered my elbow and I was on a morphine drip. So little pressure to perform. That memory makes me almost recall what I was in my past life, but then it’s gone.

Drunk bear is done with me. Initially, he was amused, but now he’s suspicious. He’s edging towards the sober bears. I imagine a preemptive tongue wagging.

When I depart, I walk casually, my best imitation of a politically unaffiliated bear getting ready for a deep sleep. I head to my computer to order my blackout blinds. Shit. I don’t have a computer. I’m a bear. I wonder where they keep the caves.

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Amy Sea

100 X Top Writer, Editor— MuddyUm Editor, Breast Stories Editor-in-Chief — Comedian, Satirist, Humorist, Top Writer. Publisher of Breast Stories.