Upon Waking.

The first thing i think upon waking: the light and how it passes through the fabric across my window. I wonder of the sky and if it holds clouds or lets fly the sun unhinged. This light, dull or bright and the short cold trees, leafless in the backyard. I'll reach for my clock and bring the tone, this hue faintly illuminating me upon a square of crumpled bedding... put it alongside the actual time of day, make sense of it. Then rising, go about my routines of boiling water and washing my face, grinding the beans and musing the shelf for breakfast.

Every single thing touched or turned over needs another thing, thought or remembered to somehow verify it. And especially in the morning, nothing stands alone as just itself. The coffee is the wakefulness and it needs a cup, the cream already poured and waiting. The oats, a pot and water rising to bubble and steam.

And as clarity comes on (whatever clarity is~ perhaps a raveling to this reality i've adjusted to), these physical items i hold in my hands become links to seemingly unrelated memories. The keys jingling in my pocket on my way to work... i think of our dog Dawson running ahead on the Alaskan trails, a bell about her neck signaling bears of our presence. Or all the classroom smells at my charter school: freshly washed heads, the sweet smell of paint in the artroom, sorry lunchroom memory of fishsticks past and disinfectant. Every smell conjuring something... and me standing there peeling a tangerine while the kids find their friends and tear into paper bags, lunchboxes, or the prepackaged solids a meal ticket receives. And the Japanese girl in my mind, years back telling me how to peel with the intention of gathering one rind, one strip of orange citrus skin... for good luck or some such thing.

I listen to this input, these constant overlaps of life. They bring me closer to feeling connected; sometimes they threaten to drive me mad. But mostly i welcome them. It's an exercise to draw lines between the lives we've lived, whether young or old. An invisible connect-the-dots, like the nightsky overhead upon which we strain our necks upward- trying to make out the horse in Pegasus, Orion's bow, a high-flying Delphian kite. And none of it really there; it never was. Yet it's sweet to imagine... to believe in this chronology that our lives continue on, with one person leading the way. That one person, you or me. In brief attempts i try, but quickly lose track of which person that was that said those things, that did those things. Who was that whom i've always held close and called me?