I’m awake before her — always have been, I’m wired earlier —
and there’s a half hour between my waking and hers
that I don’t tell many people about, because it sounds
either boring or unsettling depending on who’s listening.
I make coffee, I sit with it at the kitchen window,
I look at the yard and the light changing in the yard,
and the whole house has the specific quality
of being inhabited by someone who’s still asleep.
Morning before you wake, the house holds your weight,
the coffee’s on and the light’s coming in at the low angle,
and I’m here with the quiet that belongs to both of us —
mine because I’m in it, yours because you made it.
Morning before you wake, I have the thought I always have:
that I am the luckiest shape of myself I’ve ever been,
sitting here with the coffee and the light and the knowledge
that in twenty minutes you’ll come through that door.
The sound when she gets up — the specific sequence of it:
the water running, the second water running, the footsteps
that are lighter going to the bathroom than coming back,
heavier with the weight of someone coming into their day.
And then the kitchen doorway, hair undone, the look
of someone who hasn’t decided to be presentable yet —
the face before the face, the one I love most of all,
the pre-performance, pre-public, actual her.
She doesn’t talk much before the first coffee —
that took me a year to learn and cost me something,
the chirpy morning person crashing into the person
who needs thirty minutes before she can be reached.
Now I hand her the cup before she asks
and I sit back down and let the coffee do its work —
the gift of having learned someone is knowing
when the gift is silence and when the gift is something else.
There are mornings she comes in already talking —
something she was thinking about before she was fully up,
a continuation of a dream or a continuation of last night —
and I pivot immediately, set aside the quiet,
because those are the best mornings, the spillover ones,
when whatever’s going on inside her head
comes out before she’s sorted and arranged it,
unfiltered, direct, still half in the other place.
I’ve learned more about her in those unfiltered mornings
than in any number of organized conversations —
the early morning brain says things the daytime brain
would edit or rephrase or hold back for the right moment.
And I sit here in the window light and receive it,
grateful for the accident of waking early,
grateful for the chemistry that makes me a morning person —
the evolutionary quirk that gives me this.
Twenty minutes. The yard and the low light.
The coffee going down and the second cup waiting.
The half hour that I keep because it teaches me something
every time I sit in it — teaches me what I have,
reminds me at the beginning of each day
before the day can make me forget or take for granted,
before the noise of it drowns out the signal —
twenty minutes of the house and her weight in it.