The Forty Minutes Before

August thirteenth. I have been calling it nothing for about six weeks now. The time before I leave for Tuesday sessions, before Wednesday yoga, before any of it starts, I kept writing 'forty minutes' in drafts and then deleting the sentence because I couldn't figure out what the forty minutes were for.

Here is what I actually do: I make coffee, I stand at the kitchen window with it, and I look at the windowsill. That's it. Not a practice. Not a ritual. Not a reset or a reset-adjacent thing. I stand there and I look at the letterpress card and the two photographs and Carol's small object and the macramé cord and the gap that has been the gap for years now, and I drink the coffee or I forget to drink it and it goes cold, and then at some point I put on shoes and leave.

The mug doing the real work before I am.

I wrote a whole draft a few weeks ago about whether I should add something to the morning, a walk, a longer stretch, some kind of earlier start to the day. I deleted it too. The honest answer, which took me until approximately 5:52 this morning to locate, is that I am already doing the thing. I just wasn't counting it because there's no shoes involved and nothing to log. It's forty minutes of looking at objects I know by heart in light that only exists for about twenty minutes before it shifts. I don't want more fitness. I want this. Earlier, and named.

The windowsill does not ask anything of me at 5:50am. That is why we get along.

The cold brew debate with Simone a few weeks ago ended in a timer and two wrong answers. This one ended in a window and one very right one. I'll take it.