What the Window Is Actually For

August twenty-fourth. The mug was cold by the time I noticed I'd stopped drinking it. That's what gave it away.

I've been writing around this for most of the summer, the forty minutes before the climbing session, the hour before the routine. I kept framing it as a question about morning fitness, as though the answer was probably a reformatted schedule, an earlier alarm, a longer run substituted for the Tuesday session. I kept waiting to want that. And then last week I stood at the kitchen window for twenty-three minutes with a coffee I forgot to drink, looking at the windowsill arrangement in the light before the street got loud, and I understood that I don't want more exercise. I want more of this. The standing still. The light changing across the letterpress card and the two photographs and the gap. The mug going cold because I wasn't paying attention to the mug.

the morning before the morning

I'm not going to do anything about it yet. That's the honest end of the thread. I'm not setting an earlier alarm or moving anything around. What I wanted to name, before the summer is over, is just that the preference exists, not more fitness, but something quieter and earlier that I've apparently already been practicing for six weeks without calling it anything. The window. The coffee. The not needing to be somewhere for another forty minutes. That's what I've been choosing, every morning, without choosing it. I think I just wanted the record to reflect that.