Morning

The older you get, the fewer your comforts become. Drinking into the night and binge watching TV no longer helps you forget a bad day or to practise ceasefire from a domestic fight. The sharp edge of survival propels you inward, and you end up deriving sanity from small, harmless acts.

Right now that is your morning cuppa. Usually it is coffee, and it makes you feel grounded, the rising plume of steam from the cup creating a whitespace that calms. On other days it highlights the choppy waters that your uncontrollable life has become, prompting you to prolong that pause just a little longer. You also recently rediscovered the beauty of froth. Being hemmed in by the few minutes to yourself before the rest of the house - man, child, dog and the cringe worthy doorbell - awakens and trudges around demanding things, you are hyper focussed on that mug. With your brew in it. In the morning. It’s 6am and the night sky is wrestling with the day, slowly losing its midnight black colour to a conciliatory chalk grey. Standing against your spotless kitchen counter gleaming black you watch, head bent into your plain white ceramic cup, mesmerised. The placid surface of water the colour of dirty mud comes alive to the thin stream of hot milk that descends on it, creating tiny, perfectly circular bubbles, just one or two at first, moving this way and that, then more and many more, banding together to create a layer, layers of anticipation, all the while turning the concoction into a rich, fulsome brown. The brown of thick tree barks, with their age old wisdom, branches dancing to the breeze and sheer solidity. The brown of a milk chocolate bar, never mind that it actually has more sugar than chocolate. The deep brown of the labrador across the street, its tail wagging and perpetually wet tongue dripping saliva over your exposed toes as you rub him on his neck. 

Your fingers are cold and stiff from clutching the thick handle of the milk jar, a larger version of the cup in clear pyrex glass. They wrap around your mug, and the warmth seeps in immediately. You lift it and straighten up, the weight of your toil pleasurably heavy in your hands. As cup meets lip, the froth tickles, bubbles bursting into frivolity. So carefully created, so easily burst. A few more careful sips, this time your tongue feeling more confident, and the warmth spreads down your chest in a careful line of heat, gently pooling in your stomach. You flex your  chilled toes, wishing that they could get some coffee too. The smell of coffee is everywhere in the kitchen now, it’s hugging you and you lean in, wanting more, needing more. It is no longer small, or harmless. It’s a good morning and it’s almost everything that you will do for the rest of the day. 

It wasn’t always this way. Mornings used to be unrelenting, the cunning light cutting through the drawn curtains to prick your blissfully closed eyelids, forcing them open. Or your mother’s voice, booming like a drumbeat in a closed room, bouncing off the walls in her house and slithering under your door, “Wake up, you’ll be late for school!” They used to be cruel during the years you stumbled out of your room in a tiny flat in the city, eyes half shut, stubbing your toe on the raised edge of the toilet (we did it to keep the overflowing drain from ruining the house, you know, the landlady had explained practically) on your way to brush your teeth. Then rushing out thirty minutes after, late for the train and later for work. 

Now they are in hand, the mornings. Not because of your age, or because it’s a particular day of the week, or the fact that you consider five hours of sleep a luxury. But because, as the house wallows in chaos and the sun peeks through the clouds, you have a rite that creates it just the way you like it.