prompted, stream of consciousness

some people’s mornings

Sometimes I wonder if anyone who really loves the quiet of morning has ever stayed awake through the night. Or if we just have different quiets, different mornings, different nights. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is really living in an alternative universe and we just occasionally bump into each other.

We’d be kinder to each other if that were the case, I think.

We’d say “Hello! How is your universe?”

And we’d listen– really listen– because human beings grow four times more curious than we ever could tall.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask how your universe is, and I’d listen. I am feeling more curious than anything else lately. Yesterday morning– bright and brash like all my universe’s mornings– I would have said I was more filled with questions than blood cells, but then I spoke to a dozen children through emails and phone calls and voice chats all day, and I realized they had more questions in a single hand than I did in a galaxy.

If you tattoo yourself in the same color as your skin, would you be able to see it when you slap yourself? If you could charge yourself instead of sleep, would you, even if it made your breath smell bad? Is it still poetry if no one likes it? If we live inside forever, how long before we start to look different?

Frankly, I’m still a bit worn out, but in the happy way that happens around still-growing humans. If we were having coffee, I’d probably be pretty quiet.

Quiet as some people’s mornings.

I’d sip my non-caffeinated tea, and listen to my start of day. How the ocean shakes her tail of yesterday and the drip and fog splashes in tiny droplets all over the city with a soft swish sound. How the delivery drivers shout their restock items to the restaurants, trying to outhowl the wind. The palm rustle. The early work traffic that honks at the drivers and swerve around fallen palm. The song of the birds who remember when this city was built around them. They call it child and they chirp that it is time to get up.

The children will be already up, no matter what morning-time it is when I refill your cup. I’d serve you your drink of choice, no worries. My universe has some caffeine laws in place, but I know that yours probably does not.

Without conventional school hours anymore, the children zoom past in scooters and bikes. They stop at my gnome home and shout in surprise, I didn’t think we were going to get a gnome Christmas this year.

They almost didn’t. I had a few rolls of ribbon and a universe still running on sleep as the primary charge.

The shouting wakes me up, every day, but I let the birds preen throughout the day as though they did the heavy lifting. The delivery drivers have nothing to carry so big as a sleeping city, after all.

I’d ask you if your morning is quiet even when you share it with me.

If We Were Having Coffee weekly prompt hosted by EclecticAli. See or join the participating posts here: https://fresh.inlinkz.com/party/9b19ac173bad46549a9991056d535562

29 thoughts on “some people’s mornings”

  1. Aren’t children’s questions magic…

    I spend the waking bits of morning uncreaking various joints. Currently jaw…and raging, silently at my sinus then quickly reminding myself people are dealing with so much worse.

    The streets around me are silent (post Covid lockdown and wfh habits) except for the building site directly behind – which I think is going to take forever.

    My tea has caffeine and I’ll drink several half mugs throughout the day.

    xx

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      1. Actually I think builders were able to work the whole way through here but now, yes, most restrictions are eased. I hesitate to say, cos I know you’re going through hell in the US, but we’re CURrently in a good place Covid-wise. I also know that can change very quickly so….

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  5. “Is it still poetry if no one likes it?”
    I’ve often wondered this myself.

    You write with love. A true inspiration.

    My mornings vary. Five days out of the week I wake up before the sun rises to go to work. I supervise kids while they attend class through a screen. Sometimes I help them with their homework. They make me laugh, they make me frown; it’s wonderful. A true blessing. God knows those five months without work were a struggle on more than one level.
    On the weekend, I doze in and out of sleep until around nine. I make my way to the kitchen/living room where my nieces and nephews groggily rise from their air mattress. My brother folds some blankets, while his coffee cools.

    It’s been quite the year here in the U.S.

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    1. I had no answers and a million answers to that one. 🙂 Like most writing, I suppose it’s as simple as — it is the act that makes it what it is, not the effect. 🙂

      I’m glad for your job, and the blessings that it brings. 💕. Your mornings sound full of warm and family, and that sounds like a lovely universe to me.

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      1. I like that. It’s the process that is the spirit of art, not the product alone.

        Thank you! They weren’t always like this, and I was a bit resistant to the changes, but I’m coming around to fully appreciating everything 💕

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  6. I wish my mornings were peaceful like yours. I am a night person through and through. I walk the streets at 2am, which is technically morning, and thank the universe for peace. Come morning, I’m a frazzled mess.

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  8. I sit here, late in the night, and preparing to be up even later, alone. Nothing new I suppose. I moved out here on this farm, in the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors, for peace. And I spend 90% of my time alone, aside from the occasional visit out of my almost 16 year old’s bedroom.

    Peace is the opposite of what I got out here however. After being a quiet and very respectful tenant, and never late on rent, my 74 year old landlord has made it his personal mission for the past year to torture me in every way possible for his own pleasure. Throwing my things across the yard, circling my property daily on his golf cart, and even placing huge boulders in my driveway so that my entry to my place of residence has became a sort of ninja, reality show type obstacle course. And his latest attempt at torture is refusing my money order for rent and demanding that he only accepts cash from here on out. Which I of course told him not happening with many words I won’t enter here as I retrieved my money order, and did a slow motion walk with a hair flip back to my safe haven.

    Currently, I am still smiling however. Because I am an ex-paralegal and his has greatly underestimated me. 🙂
    I have enough video evidence in my possession to send him back to the onion shack he was birthed in, and the knowledge to store my rent payments with the registrar’s office at the courthouse so he can’t try and get me for non-payment of rent. Not if, but when he decides to evict me for the many reasons he will come up with, I will smile in court while he gets exactly what’s coming his way.

    So, I sip my coffee day in, and day out, careful with how I let him get to me. Because I have an Autistic daughter who also suffers with severe mental health issues, and I suffer with Lupus, Fibro, and a muscle disease called dystonia, and because of his torment, have recently started showing stroke symptoms. I am only 36 with all of these ailments, and coffee is my recovery each morning, or each lunch-time, whichever my body decides to revive.

    Thank you so much for providing a read that soothed my soul, if only for a moment. Good day to you. Or good evening, preference is all yours.

    Debra 😉

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    1. Thanks for reading, Debra. I’m sorry for the situation you’re in but I’m glad you feel you have the tools to handle it. I’m also 36 and chronically ill, and my stoke symptoms are from a series of tiny strokes I had last year– I wish you didn’t share this with me, but I’m also always glad to know someone else who gets it. Wishing you peace.

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  9. I miss the Morning Coffee posts; I don’t think it would be too out of place to include them again, do you think?
    Your mornings, like most things you do, sound like magic. Mine are sporadic, waking up far too early as often as far too late. I blame the new moon — she does this to me frequently. But they all start with puppy snuggles and coffee, regardless of how loud or still the traffic beyond my window is. There is no ocean here, nor enough trees to make rustling sounds with the occasional breeze. Just traffic, and sometimes the birds, and the even breaths of a sleeping dog.
    Ach, children, haha. So much energy and no way of directing it — what a trip. They do raise excellent questions, though.

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    1. I don’t think so at all! The nice thing about them is how they seem to fit on everyone’s blog. 😀 Yay for puppy snuggles and coffee! That seems its own kind of magic.

      And yes, a book of kid-questions could stump us all for all eternity, and by then they’d have more. 😀

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  12. I’m a night owl, I like the quiet of night and consequently I wake up late or rather woken up by sounds of the world insisting it’s awake and so should everyone and it’s not quiet about it..

    The curiousity of children is really something in about for Whys you can have reached the question to the purpose of existence and the meaning of life and further to questions you would need to die to answer 🤣🤣
    Reminded me of an article on letters to God when kids were asked to write letters to God some of them are really thought provoking
    ~B

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  13. Someone I love shared this song with me earlier and it had me thinking about this post to pass along to her. Stumbled on a poem of yours a few weeks ago and it’s been lovely reading the way you put relatable things into words so thank you 🙂

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