The Hour before Go

The mornings are mine for about an hour.

I drink my coffee in bed before anyone else is up, watching the sky move from dark to something I don't have a word for. That gray-pink that exists only in the first few minutes of a day that hasn't been asked anything yet. I don't check my phone. I don't run through my calendar. I just let my mind run loose through the things that belong to me when no one needs anything from me yet.

This is the only hour that has not been claimed.

I don't think most people understand what that means. 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, all fifteen spent awake, have names on them. This one is mine.

So I do the 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 margins of a full life. The margins belong to everyone else. So I bring them here, into the quiet, with both hands around my cup, and I let myself want things out loud for a little while.

Then the day whispers go.

It is never one thing. It's the child in the doorway asking for a muffin in the little voice that assumes I will simply materialize and make it happen, because I always do. It's the dog standing patient by the door, his whole body a quiet question. 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 says go. The 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 got up in the first place.

The math is simple. One hour that's mine, fifteen hours that's theirs, 8 hours to rest. I've looked at those numbers long enough to stop being surprised by them. 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 its important. And I am already looking forward to tomorrow's.