Too many dawns start out like this: with blood-drawn, drunken eyes searching for their redemption. My mornings start before the sun’s. So, here’s to the night that I left, preemptively, for responsibility’s sake.
Thick grains were rolling in my mouth: their taste relieving themselves on my tongue. The feeling was so familiar. There is a comfort in consistency. Like every other morning, these dark brown flakes will make their way into me, gently bringing my sleep-induced body to full consciousness. The words you read are, justly, a result of this reaction.
I suppose one might feel it strange to anticipate the rivalry of two like bodies. Not that I, by any means, am calling myself a sadistic person, but rather I am calling myself one who has learned to accept overhearing conflict. This, I supposed, could be illustrated as I listened to the coffee machine; the heat rising from its canvas. Each drop of liquid tore at the calm of that darkened morning. On most days, this sound would have fetched me from my sleep.
The small numbers tell me its half-past five. I can hear my mother wrestling with blindness to find her slippers. The quite of the early morning is foreign to most. With these last, precious, moments to myself, I take another cup of coffee. The wood, lying dutifully on the floor, made my toes curl. It nibbled playfully at my naked feat. If only the wood knew I had a cat to do that.
The same cat, in fact, that nibbled, I suppose slightly more painfully, at my fingers last night. He amused himself, long before my day began, by making a midnight snack out of my drowsy palm. To be honest, I remember his reprimand better than the crime.
It will be another hour or so before I feed that cat.
Have you ever wondered, in the moments you have to yourself, how strange it is that other lives exist? How is it possible that you do not know the beauty of a sunless morning? Is this car I have recently learned to drive to always drive before the sunrise? How are we to know? And how bizarre it is that lives can unravel without into crossing my lane. Too many times this inhumane task is asked of us: To denude our tangible world makes listening so much easier.
With my mouth too tired for words, it is time to fight the keyboard. I allow the letters to find their place. Most of them only to exist for a moment before eaten again by the backspace key. The ones that survive will eventually fall subject to inspection. Existence is such a momentary joy. I hope someday these letters will form the words that create interstates among foreign paths. From this place I sit, flaky, weight-loss cereal waiting; milk-saturated and formless, to your eyes: I hope these words are painless and exigent.