Seven Mornings Worth Keeping

4:47 AM, Tbilisi. The apartment on Kostava Street had no curtains, and the streetlights came through orange. Someone was baking bread two floors down — that specific smell of yeast and char that arrives before anything else in a city waking up. No alarm had been set. The waking just happened, the way waking sometimes does when you’re somewhere that isn’t home and the strangeness of it keeps a part of you alert all night.

6:15 AM, Seattle ferry dock. January. The Bainbridge ferry hadn’t loaded yet and the terminal coffee was burnt and thin. A man in painter’s whites was reading a physical newspaper, actually folding it in quarters the way people used to. The water was the color of old pewter. Cold came off it in a way you could feel on the inside of your nose.

5:50 AM, a hospital waiting room. Not the worst night, not the best. The vending machine hummed. A nurse walked by and said “still here?” and those two words were the kindest sentence anyone had spoken in eight hours. The morning didn’t ask anything. It just arrived and let that be enough.

7:30 AM, outside Oaxaca. My daughter was four and she had found a dog and was explaining the dog to the dog in careful, patient Spanish. The dog had no interest in this information. The sun was already hard and yellow and hitting the white wall across the street so bright it was almost a sound.

5:10 AM, a kitchen in Edinburgh. The thing about reading before anyone else in the house is awake is that the silence has weight. Not absence of noise — actual presence of quiet, a thing you can push against. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, a glass of water. Outside, rain on stone. Nothing happened for forty minutes.

6:40 AM, a freight train delay, somewhere in Ohio. The Amtrak sat still on a siding for two hours. Nobody knew why. After the first half hour of irritation, something released. The fields outside were flat and pale green and a red-tailed hawk was working a fence line, patient as something geological. Two strangers started talking about rivers.

4:15 AM, my own house. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t fight it. Sat at the kitchen table with no lights on except the one above the stove. Made tea I didn’t need. The refrigerator cycled off and the house was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat, which startled me, which then seemed funny, sitting there alone in the dark, startled by the sound of being alive.