Our mornings nearly always unfold in the same way.
We reserve those initial hours
for stretching out muscles and moments.
we turn on slowly,
these tickers are getting older every day,
It seems,
our engines don’t turn like they used to
it’s a sputtering sort of process
A stop-and-go kind of thing
Slow
Steady.
Reliable.
Old souls in young bodies, one might say.
Our aches and ailments aren’t all that bad,
Our muscles haven’t knotted and we haven’t grown frail,
At least not quite yet, anyways.
Oh, but our souls?
These ol’ things?
They take some time to get going,
They need a little warming up before we can --
well, before we can really do a **** thing,
Just enough time to ignite the fires in our respective bellies,
And to settle into the heat.
And we’ve got it down to a science.
It starts in the toes.
Yours find mine,
Or mine yours,
And I ease into knowing that you and i got lucky,
Maybe the only luck we’ll ever have
or at least the very best of what we’ll ever see of it,
How fortunate it is to find the body that holds the soul
That wakes yours gently, slowly…
i digress.
Next goes the hands,
To the hair
Or the face
Then comes the muscles through our backs, shoulders,
We get reacquainted with sunshine and song birds.
We adjust.
Adjust the blanket, the pillows,
Adjust our schedules
(10 more minutes, we won’t be late)
Adjust our bones, our bodies,
Our expectations.
We take our time
tweaking and turning ourselves into the type of people who
Get dressed and
Brush their teeth and
Socialize and
Go to the bank and
The grocery store and
Reply to emails and
Call their moms and
Pay their bills and
Clock into work on time and
Get through work without crying and
Remember to take their meds and
And oh, god, okay, fine,
Five more minutes, i digress.
Finally
we lean into the weight of the world and take it on in pieces. A slow drip. A toe in the water, then the leg.
Two tortoises in a hare race,
We know how to conserve the stamina we’ve got.
We know we’ll thank ourselves for it in the long run.
So, our mornings go slow.
Steady.
Some mornings are an easier start-up than others.
Sometimes the rain aches deep in our chests.
Or the late night slips sandbags into our eyelids.
Other days, our hearts are quick to fall into formation,
Well-rested
or still ******,
But we don’t let that change our pace, nevertheless.
Our mornings,
Our slow, stretching, simple mornings,
They let something live in us that i’m not so sure was there before,
A feeling so deep and peculiar,
An appreciation, i suppose,
For the syrupy-slow sort of way that we unravel ourselves at the dreamscapes
And knit ourselves into the fabric that is the act of being,
Gently.
One day,
Probably sooner than we’d like to admit,
our souls will wake slowly and our bodies even slower.
We’ll crack and pop from head to toe,
Our bones and backs will ache and pinch and grind and pull,
And we’ll adjust accordingly.
As we do.
We’ll let our bodies, knotted and frail,
Take their time easing into each new daytime.
And our souls, the same,
As they’ve grown accustomed to.
This, at least, we can give to one another.
On days that we have nothing to offer except
Yesterday’s leftover hurt and
The shells of people we once knew,
We once were,
We can give each other slow, steady.
We can sit together quiet,
unfold the sunrise
(or whatever happens hours after the sun rises),
And wait for our engines to purr to life.
If nothing else, we have our mornings.
Our old souls, our stretching muscles and moments.
We have it down to a science,
Us and our mornings.
Isn’t that lucky?
a.m.