In some kind of morning - #81

A collection of the best and worst mornings.

Hello beautiful people. I wanted to give you a heads-up that from April 16-30, Shangrilogs will mostly be on hiatus. Ben and I are going on a big trip just for us, and then we’ll be flying to Ohio for my grandma’s memorial. Thanks for giving me a little space to take a breath. May we all take April for a little self-nourishment so we can bloom for the rest of the year. Speaking of May, I’m hoping it’s full of kittens. 

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To write this, I am in bed. I’m taking a particularly slow morning because I’ve got mornings on the brain. I have been counting them. Counting down to when joy returns, to when vacation starts, to when grief ebbs, to when spring will come, to when the light will kiss my cheeks to start the day. Morning is supposedly its own segment of the day, accompanied by afternoon, evening, late night, and the witching hour, but morning isn’t a segment. It’s the conductor. To do something different than what the conductor has chosen, to find joy in a somber concerto or a symphony of anger, you have to fight for it. 

Part of my current job includes understanding our emotions throughout the day, and as I’ve had to investigate my own in this process, I’ve been reveling at the sheer potency of a morning emotion. By 10 am, I am this and that and all of the above, balancing feeling with rationale, but at 7 am? 6 am? Most emotions from the day before have sifted through my rib cage settling into my spine. Only the thickest sits atop my chest waiting for me to wake up, a hungry cat with one paw on your face, claws resting like a blade on your throat. 

But that’s the other thing about mornings, the audience is rapt by the conductor only for a few moments before getting aptly lost in the music. I remember the days and the nights for their action, but the mornings drift into the background. Except for a select few. So here, a collection of the best, the worst, the notable, and the ones I am learning to rest in. But this time, I’m the conductor. Alongside each morning, you’ll find a song that for me captures it perfectly, in order here. 

Snow day morning - Head Over Heels by JD McPherson

The best version of this was the ticker tape one. Turning on the local news to see the NYSE of school districts listed at the bottom of the screen in alphabetical order, heightened by the unlikelihood that ours would be listed. We got the most snow and the fewest snow days. Snow did not impede us. We were children of the snow. Teens wearing miniskirts in zero degrees. Track practice in fresh powder. School buses like tanks, plowing through whatever fresh hell awaits them. It didn’t matter when we turned the TV on, we’d always just missed our spot in the alphabet. The only news was the weather, the anchorman speaking only of power outages, closed roads, and accumulation while we read school after school granted their freedom. As it edged ever closer to our position in the lineup, we edged closer to the TV, wide-eyed and hands clasped. The first letter, the second letter, the third letter, and with the sweet relief of the full name, we’d exclaim in unison with the deep sigh of our parents. School was CANCELED! The world was endless! Snow angels instead of math! Sledding instead of science! Video games instead of English! Pure sugar for breakfast!!! 

Here, the child is Ben. His vision is — well it’s barely vision. Until he smacks a few things off his end table in the process of elimination to find his glasses, he can’t tell how much it’s snowed. That task falls to me, looking outside to approximate a weather report. How strong was the wind? How deep is the powder? How good are the conditions? I am the fatigued parent telling him, “I don’t know, I can’t really tell,” while he jabs me to “just look.” His excitement is palpable when I turn to him, grinning ear to ear: “it’s still snowing.” 

On these mornings, we’re on a mission. On these mornings, I’ve left my coziest clothes right next to the space heater so I can move quickly. From here, it’s a delighted dash around the house opening various blinds so we can make our full assessment, deeming the day either a disappointment or “a pretty good storm.” And when it’s a good one? Oh it’s a real good one. We’re building a fire, we’re bending time to make coffee faster, we’re heating up boots and picking gloves. We’re loading up and heading out like we’re getting paid for it. It’s a snow day after all. What are we supposed to do?

Grief morning - Wouldn’t Come Back by Trousdale

It’s a sand bag that matriculates in mere moments from crust to crushing. Sadness breaks through like pie filling, boiling onto the skin, heaving from a deep center. Something that was there in your dreams is revealed again and again to be gone. All the food and TV and texts and music and worries and wonders you filled it with the day before have been used up, and so are you. You weep quietly, not wanting to let the day know you’re there yet, not like this, please let me collect myself before I leave the space where this wasn’t real. Where I could hold you. I can’t even hold myself together. 

But this bed only holds you in it. You cannot wade the River Styx to them — you can only wade through the marsh of memories around you, grabbing at your ankles and your heart and your esophagus as you try to remember how to breathe. You feel it in your gums and your fingernails, in the twine tightening around organs. You feel it in your anger at the sun, having the gall to rise. You feel it in the coffee, having the audacity to let its steam dance as if there is anything to dance for. 

How does a person pretend to be when the illusion is shattered, when the corner pieces of the puzzle are gone? How does a person be without you there to be with them? The butter doesn’t spread. The music doesn’t play. The calendar is longer than it has ever been. 

Hangover morning - Don’t Ask by John Craigie

First, go back to sleep. You check your phone to make sure you’re still in the same dimension you attempted to escape last night, open your laptop to whatever dreck will accompany you back into the nether region of dreams, and adjust to whatever most deeply comforts whatever most deeply hurts. I prefer a bout of nausea to a headache, but stillness cradles either. I drink the rest of the electrolyte water I made myself in the middle of the night, sweet sweet middle of the night guardian me, and I fall back asleep. 

Only hunger can bring you back to the living. Get me a hamburger. Get me a bucket of fries. Run me a bath of grease or pedialyte or both. Doesn’t matter which. Queue up New Girl or Seinfeld or the entirety of Lord of the Rings or should we have a Nic Cage marathon? Google a list of “the horniest movies”. Watch 8 straight hours of Bake Off, order takeout twice, remember you have popcorn somewhere in the cupboard. God this couch is comfortable, you’re such a good couch, couch. Remember tomorrow is Sunday, absolutely bathe in your good fortune that you can also spend all of tomorrow recovering, and play three hours of Candy Crush. Justify spending money on it because real video games are way more expensive than this pack of power-ups for $7.99 that will run out after three levels.

Today is a day for indulgences, a continuation of sins from the night before. You still have gluttony and sloth left on your Baddie Bingo card. You know there’s something delicious waiting for you: that moment when the grease and the water and the advil and the rest results in something relief, when you might even step outside to feel the sun on your face and wonder for the briefest of moments, for the sweetest sliver of time, if maybe, just maybe, you should do it again.

You laugh. No. No, the only thing you’re doing again is eating more of those fries. 

Early flight morning - Domino by Shovels & Rope

This is what dying feels like, it must be, because to imagine something worse is impossible. I am already missing my flight even though this is the time I measured out last night to be practical even if it took me several minutes to revive this corpse I am trapped in. If I am not sick, it is because my passport was surely nipped by gremlins in the night, because upon opening my bag, it is not the first thing I see. Even if it’s just the second or third thing I see, it requires a check-in every 15 minutes to ensure it has not traveled without you. Adrenaline is the only feeling aside from the cavernous hunger I only ever feel when waking up at 3:30 in the morning.

It doesn’t matter if the person you’re traveling with moves faster or slower than you, they’re both agony. Who am I kidding, they always move slower. What if there’s traffic? you demand to which they say at 4am? This is the worst morning to have pourover coffee be how you make coffee. The drip is remote water torture and there’s a line 40-deep at the Terminal A Starbucks we need to get to because this coffee can’t even come on the plane. My bag is too heavy but I didn’t pack enough and as soon as we leave, the house is burning down because the curling iron I have not used in five years is surely plugged in. I have never heard of someone burning their house down this way which means I will be the exceptional exception to the rule since it’s not plugged in in the first place. 

But after the initial 15 minutes of panic, there’s something else. A curling at the lips. A widening of the eyes. Somehow a free facelift as pure excitement seeps into your ligaments, loosening you into an inflatable dancing car sales balloon as you realize why you’re doing this to yourself: you’re going on vacation. Whether or not it’s true, there’s this sense that you’re unshackled from … from everything! From picking up the mail! From answering Slacks! From wondering what’s in the fridge! From people! Or at least the people you see every day! 

Though, it’s worth noting this morning is inevitably colored by where you’re going and what you’re doing there. I once had an early flight to Boston to do a shoot with the gymnast Aly Raisman. I’m sure Boston is a fine city, but we have nothing in common. And as nice as Aly and her dog are, I really don’t care about almost any Olympic athletes. Sorry! But a flight in business attire? In business class? Now this is something I care about. I am wearing slacks. I am opening my laptop with such an urgency that it makes the people at my gate and in my aisle seep even further into their own vacation fantasies because they’re free to read a magazine! Can you imagine? A magazine? When there’s business to be done? I am the star in some late 80s movie about climbing the corporate ladder, and I’ve got the soundtrack to prove it.

But the best flight to catch is the one to your personal paradise. Sit with it for a moment. When you get that slippery excitement of finally, where are you going? For me, it’s where the plants grow huge, the sun sets early, and humidity wraps you in its grips like an expensive spa treatment. The biggest conundrum of the day is how to dress when it’s 18°F where you live but 81° where you’re going. I brace for the walk from the house to the car like cold therapy because life is about to get better for a week. It’s about to be tropical.

The first morning of vacation - The Fire by Natalie Prass

In contrast to the morning the day before when you scorned every habit you’d built to that point, now, there is bliss. There are strange sheets and strange sounds and strange coffee. None of it matters except in how delightfully different it is from yours. Is that an elk bugle? A howler monkey? The sound of a thousand synchronized espresso machines singing the orchestral accompaniment of Italy? Drown me in it, I am in heaven. Could it be a hustle and bustle that I am merely a butterfly in? Wafting through crowds and breezes, feather light and radiating as passersby can’t help but marvel at how light and lovely I seem. 

I have nothing to do and nothing in the way of doing everything. I am a receiver, the world a giver, and my Out of Office is my bodyguard, my spiritual moat. The only task that whispers my name is the coffee maker sitting across the room, promising the best worst coffee you’ve ever had, but it takes like somewhere else and that somewhere else is perfect. Maybe I even take the coffee into the long hot shower I earned after such long travels. I want to be refreshed for one of the best parts of the day: choosing what I will wear.

My first outfit sets the tone for the new identity I’ve built for this trip. Buttondowns tied at the waist, flowing skirts, low ponytails tied with ribbons. I am not a girl who wears a massive fluffy onesie with coffee stains on it at home. No, I am a girl who carries her bag on her forearm because there’s nothing in it but opportunity. That’s all that lies ahead. The world is endless.

Friday morning before a three day weekend - Midnight Rider by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

Who cares! There’s pep in the step, there's joy in the coffee, there’s a breeze through emails and meetings. We work together the way we’re meant to work, giving a C performance because so is everyone else, or giving the easiest A performance of your life with nonchalance because it’s about to be over. Let’s see what level of Hell someone tried to drag me to, because honey I’m in purgatory with my friends and I simply will not. 

Is it 3pm? Is 12pm close enough? How’s the ambient noise outside because I’m amongst the trees and the sun like a bird after the rain letting my feathers ruffle and shuffle, puffing for all my fellow free-riders heading toward three days of absolute abject freedom. What is a three day weekend if not a four day revelation?

Why does this morning make me feel better at my job? I am slinging tasks left and right, cleaning up my inbox so I can really extend this Saturday-Sunday-Monday extravaganza into a lazy Tuesday at the tail. 

I start making plans, like one day is for the couch and one day is for the trails and one day is for the errands that suddenly seem fun because they’re not crammed into the cracks of stress and overwhelm. This is how life should be! The five day work week is just made up! It’s just made up! Some men just made it up and I’m gonna make up for it all by myself this weekend. Suddenly small talk is the biggest talk we’ve got as we exchange plans. Oh, you’re going upstate? Well honey, I’m going down state, down to the river, down town, because I’m down for anything. 

Waking up in a tent - Topanga Canyon by John Vincent III

There is no way to know what time it is, because time is a construct. There is only the sun, the dew of the morning, and the birds, as there has only ever been. Stretching limb by limb, vertebrae by vertebrae, only to nest a little deeper in the pile of sleeping pads and sleeping bags. It’s cold in the way mornings are just after the settling of the night lifts back into the corners of branches and the dawn sweeps away the day before. 

You have to pee like you have had to pee for days. The most pressing issue is where are your socks? Your problems are so infinitesimal that they stack like pine needles. How quietly can I unzip this tent? How do I put my shoes on while staying as cozy as possible? Where is the best place to pee? How quietly can I slink back into this sleeping bag? How can I get back in the tent when the entire world is unfurling in front of me with sunrises and bird song and babbling brooks and the crunch of all my sweet and tiny problems beneath my feet?

Layers make the misty morning, and you’re three deep in a baselayer, a fleece, and a puffy while you rummage through your cooking supplies. It’s time to filter some water. You drift between being a pioneer panning for gold and a fawn bending to the rocks for a sweet drink of that fresh creek water. But you, you’re an explorer deep in the wilderness. You’re one with the woods, you’re where you’re meant to be, doing what you’re meant to be doing: making what is somehow the simplest and most complicated cup of coffee possible. 

The sun kisses each droplet of dew goodbye, and along with them your puffy. The sun on your face, the tin cup coffee in your hand, wool socks tucked into boots, your butt as happy to be on a log as it ever was on a couch, and you wonder as you’ve wondered so many times: why don’t I do this more often?

Slow coffee morning - Witness by Eileen Jewel

The sheer warmth of it, languid in muscle and memory. This is the one I’m in now. I can see from my window the sun is stretching out over the valley, but in the back of the house we’re still tucked gently into the shadows. The cat and dog both did their rounds in the kitchen, but they’re both back in bed. Ben is next to me, both of us with our headphones in, our hands occasionally reaching out to the other. He’s listening to a bike race, and I’m listening to the playlist I often write to, the one that holds all these mornings for me. My coffee sits on the sheet, leaning against my hip. My phone is somewhere, but I’m not sure where. The room isn’t put away. Chores are for some other time. Everything is for some other time, because for now, all there is is slowness, music, and musings. It’s a slow morning and there’s nothing we’ve promised to do but enjoy it.