night thinks about morning

I’m up at two thirty in the morning simply because I can. I have no obligations early tomorrow, but the internet and lukewarm pop cans are the food of insomniac boredom, even as I realize that I will miss the enjoyment of my favorite part of the day—morning. I inhabit a curious niche as a college-age morning person, but it’s not without reason. Morning is sort of the braided part of the day that is elegantly routine before it gets unraveled down through the hours into night where everything is spread out and wanton like Eve’s hair, beautiful in its way as well but more heartbreaking. In the morning, I know a pleasant song will play on my alarm clock, I will lower the volume but hear the song through unless my eyes are too weighty to process it. I put my feet on the floor quickly, the same how my body aches when it is vertical too long, I can only stay lying down for certain hours before my organs need to shift and situate inside me. So I step out and reacquaint myself with the feeling of my soles on the floor, cold winter wood or summer clutter I stumble over on my way to the shower/kitchen, which one comes first is a coin toss of impulse.

Say today it is the shower, I explore the perspective of barely waking and thought before language and language without interpretation, strings of words follow each other aimlessly until concrete thoughts formulate and remember the history of my brain and body. Showering is the other side of nakedness, the private soaps and shampoos, permission to touch oneself everywhere and breathe warm fragrant awakening. Sometimes it involves music, sometimes just the clicks of bottles and beating water. After the process is done, there is the stepping out into soft towels and steam clouds and examining my dark wet hair and white-green eyeballs against flushed skin. Combing, or not, the lowest layers of clothing, bathmats, planning how to decorate my canvas, pressing my stomach in and rubbing my scars, feeling gratefully hungry.

Next, the kitchen, home of breakfast, grandest meal of meditation. A book or the comics page, and so many tastes to tempt me—cold cereal and banana slices, poached egg on toast with black pepper, coffee black or tan sweet and strong, juices, maybe mom is around with a bowl of blueberries that are really too tart for my first meal but I try to be earnest. The spoon sounds tinkling on the bowl and I moosh milky banana around my mouth as I read the old lame comics or the new clever ones, animals in people-world or animal-worlds or boys with imagination, moms that have wrier souls than their cornflake husbands and what will those darn kids do next? It’s most funny when I actually laugh and then laugh because I laughed at the comics page and then I grin at my sister because my face wakes up much, much faster and she squints groggy when she tries to return the smile. Away from home, the routine is quieter but I still make plans or fend off worries until after coffee or a short post-shower nap that leaves my pillow wet but fresh.

But for all the effort spent enjoying sunrise slowly, it ends hastily when I realize time has a place on a clock that is growing slimmer. Earrings go on if I remember, chapstick, the rapid mental checklist phonekeysIDbagbooksmoneyshoesnecklace and I end up stumbling out the door at the last minute.