coming to terms

She wakes up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off instinctively by now, just to prove to him that she’s a Morning Person – a trait he’s doubted for as long as they have been together, mostly because she requires silence in the delicate moments before the caffeine kicks in: a period she refers to as, ‘Coming To Terms With My Existence.’

‘I’ll convince him soon,’ she muses, as she prepares the coffee: pushing down the plunger on her French press with a force that might be to say, ‘This means you have to keep your promise.’

‘I like making you oatmeal,’ She thinks matter-of-factly to herself, while stirring the pot’s bubbling contents in accordance with the recipe she considers Her Own, as three minutes remain in his heavy slumber.  Accidently she emits, out-loud, “My favorite thing is making you breakfast.”  She is relieved it doesn’t wake him up. 

An image of a picnic they never had floats into her mind’s eye: of her wearing a sundress she would never have the guts to buy, knee-deep in a book she’d never have the time to read, playing with his hair as he rests in her lap.  ‘This would be better if it were set to jazz,’ she says to her internal projection. 

He doesn’t like jazz, her jazz, but whenever she listens to it – especially Miles Davis’ rendition of ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ – she puts her hand to her chest as if it’s the essential gesture that keeps her alive: as if the way it hits her, the reaction elicited from the trumpet’s visceral wails, is the very thing that makes her heart beat.

His alarm goes off.  She looks over to see his reluctant allowing of the sunlight to seep into the crease of his eyelids.  He hasn’t yet Come To Terms.  She brings him coffee, milk, and sets it on the tea-crate she uses as a bed-side table.  He rolls over.  She kisses him on his temple, the softest part of his face.  He smiles, then groans horribly as he springs himself out of bed into a deep stretch.  He stretches and yells, stretches and yells – each position more impossible, each grunt more ugly than the last. 

This is how he Comes To Terms With His Existence. 

“Want a clementine?” She says, her legs perched on the table as she reclines in her favorite chair, her gaze fixed on the pink-and-blue woven socks her best friend got her in Istanbul – a place she’s never been – while she begins to peel one, and a citrus mist-cloud bursts into the air.  “They’re in season.”

“No thanks,” he says, as he sits down in her second-favorite chair, grabs her right foot and begins to crack her toes, one-by-one.  “I’m good with coffee.”

After the last knuckle pops, she leans over to him, checks his pulse and asks, “Do you think we love each other?”

He puts the back of his hand on her forehead and replies, “For now I think it’s more of a deep state of like.”