The Hour before Go

The mornings are mine for an hour.

I drink my coffee in bed before anyone else is up, watching the sky move from dark to that blue-pink that exists only in the first few minutes of a day that hasn't been called upon for anything yet. I put my phone on the charger in the living room. Putting space between my to-do list, my calendar, my emails, and me. My mind runs loose through the secrets that belong to me before anyone asks anything of me.

This is the only hour in the 24-hour cycle that has not been claimed by something else.

I'm not sure everyone understands what it means to have an hour. Not because they're dense or careless, but because if you've never had to ration your own presence down to sixty minutes, you don't notice what it costs. The rest of the hours, fourteen awake and nine asleep, have commitments on them. But this sixty minutes is mine.

So I do an inventory. I think about my dreams. I question whether I'm living close enough to the things that actually matter, or just staying busy with what's loudest. Whether the woman I'm becoming is someone I'd want to know. These are not questions you can answer in the busy hours of a full life. Those hours belong to everyone else. So I bring those questions here, into the quiet, with both hands around my cup, and I let myself want things in my head for a little while.

Then the day whispers, "go."

It is never one thing. It's the child appearing in the doorway asking for a muffin in the little voice that knows I'll say yes, because I always make the muffin even though she can. It's the dog standing patiently by the door, staring at it like its stare alone is what summons it open. It's the email asking for an update in the polite tone of someone who has been waiting. None of it is a fire. All of it is a quiet push toward a full day. "Go."

My world doesn't demand. It calls to me in the voice of things I love and know, and I go, because I've always gone, because I was raised to go, because the people on the other side of that whisper are the reason I get up in the first place.

The math is simple. One hour that's mine, 23 into the abyss of a life well lived. I've looked at those numbers long enough to stop being surprised by where the time goes. I've made a kind of peace that isn't the same as being fine with it, but is the same as choosing it anyway, every morning.

And I sigh as the day closes out. Yet the sigh is not an unhappy one. It is not resignation in the way people use that word when something has broken. It is more like the sound of someone who has counted the full cost of what she loves and keeps paying it. Not because she has to, but because she means to.

The hour is short but it's mine. And I am already looking forward to tomorrow's.

XOXO,