I love my mornings.
I might dislike this city, but I love these mornings. I'm in love with my space. My roomy, aired house and my plants that make it feel like alive. Make me feel like alive.
Since I was a little girl, I had this horror of alarm clocks. I used to wake with an alarm for school. I remember distinctly the alarm ringing in the cold dark early in my fourth year of school. I was nine, and logically the alarm had been running for three years before, yet I remember none of that. But in my fourth year, I was forced to change school. I did not like the school. I wasn't bullied. I was never bullied. The teachers and the kids were nice, but they had their own group after three years together. I felt an outsider. And I loathed the white shirts they made us wear. To this day, I can't stand a uniform. Maybe a sexy fireman or something. But otherwise, I loathe them. The dressing up, the making everyone the same. As if school didn't do a good enough job of making everyone the same already.
I work to live a life where I don't have to wake to an alarm. I remove myself from convention. I make concessions that to me don't feel like concessions precisely because I'm in love with my life. For me, it's worth it, ergo not missing out.
For a while, I tried waking early, but I write better after dark, I found, so that didn't work. Now, I wake up around 10. 10.30. I'm very tired thanks to the heat and the speed at which I try to live my life. So I sleep pretty late. I wake up and write if words are misplaced inside my head.
Then, I put on a song if there are any that need playing. I make my bed.
I go water my plants in my app thinks I should. I didn't think you needed an app, but then I kept overwatering my plants. So I tried Planta and my plants seem to be doing better. It tells me when to water them and if there's too much sun. Reminds me to pace myself, but also to trust my gut. I'm on occasion rebellious.
And then, it's time for coffee.
I fill my moka pot to the brim, then heap on the spoonfuls of strong black. Use the back of my teaspoon to pat the ground coffee into a neat, orderly surface 'cause I heard somewhere online it helps it brew better. It sounds bullshitty, but I like the look of it, so I do it.
I put the coffee on, then make breakfast. Cereal. Nuts and berries. Some kind of sustenance. I sit in the wide open window of my kitchen, peering down at the neighbors. Listening to churchbells. Stooping so I get the sun on my face and in my eyes, 'cause I heard somewhere it helps you regulate your body better if you get sun before anything else.
Does music count?
I get sun. I feel better. Like anything is possible. I listen to the voice of the priest singing in the corner church. It's peaceful, somehow. I associate it with serenity, even though I was never a church girl, and even if I had been, the church on the corner would still be the wrong creed. I listen.
Mornings are good for receiving. I seldom write long-form in the mornings. I take in. I hear the coffee brewing. The milk spilled over. I turn off the stove.
I've started pacing my coffee. The moka pot is not for one person, but the Bialetti people don't understand I'm not just one person. Still, I pour about a third of the pot, maybe half in my too-big cup. It helps the coffee cool faster. Set the rest on a coaster to wait.
I like the idea of something good waiting for me down the line almost as much as I do the taste of pleasure in the moment. It's a tightrope. Delayed gratification. There's something enticing and dusty about coffee that's gone cold in the cup because you couldn't finish it in the morning. But for now, I'm enjoying the romance of a waiting pot, guarding my coffee.
I drink it black, with no frills. No milk, no frother, no, frogs and no harlequins. I turn off the music, and nestle in my chair. Amid my plants and my feeling of aliveness, though not always. Sometimes, I'll delay and have breakfast standing, at the kitchen window, taking in the street. The songs. I reach for old songs because I can't reach into the past so fresh outta bed.
Bob Dylan will do.
In my chair, I read. I isolate myself. Turn off my songs, and leave the phone in another room. The coffee pot, I bring closer, perhaps in my living room. I don't like having to go through too many doorways to get to it, because when I do, I forget. I forget things too fast already.
The mornings, I take in. The afternoons, I let the information settle. I'm reading Richard Wright's Black Boy for a literature course I'm taking. It's not a book I would've read were it not for the class, probably. I take in.
In the evenings, I let out. I sit in the dark, in the candlelight, and I pour forward. Sometimes, my coffee will last me till evening, though on those days, I tend to scrounge it off the outside world, to tide me over. I go for coffee with a friend or get some visiting my mom. I'm a sneak.
I love my mornings because they're roomy and filled with air. They hold space for me to wake up. To be. To take in.
I take in.
A response to #spillthebeans. Look, it's here.
