Morning Person

This is a story of a quiet, complicated girl who lives a quiet, uncomplicated life. In the mornings, she would wake up very early and make herself the same breakfast: two buckwheat pancakes smeared with a tablespoon of peanut butter and topped with slices of banana and strawberries. Some people tire of eating the same food every day, but not her. This is partly because she is constantly dogged by the knowledge that sometimes love has an expiration date, and there is never enough time to fully savor what one loves. 

 

This early breakfast is the part of the day she savors the most. Little is more satisfying than filling an empty belly with good, warm food in the silence of a still-sleeping house in the morning. This silence is not empty nor demanding to be filled, but thrums with the anticipation of a fresh day to be lived and is softly animated by the ephemeral dreams of the still-asleep. It is a silence that possesses the gentle musicality and complexity of introspection; it is the silence of the dreamer, pregnant with choices to be made, anticipation and expectation of time bringing new changes, and just a bit of hope that something magical will happen today. It is the only silence she feels comfortable in. 

After washing all her dishes (she never likes leaving any loose ends to anything she does), she’d then whisk out the front door into the brisk chill only the dawn could bring. The sky lightens from black to indigo as she makes the ten minute walk along the slumbering but slowly rousing street to the bus stop where she would climb onto the express bus that would take her to the café where she works. Of course, she could have walked three minutes to the regular bus stop across the street where she lives but then she would have missed the extra seven minutes during which she could have listened to two more songs through her headphones and daydreamed a little longer. Besides, she enjoys walking and watching her surroundings at a slower pace. It is an exercise that fully fits into her conviction that anything fulfilling must be done slowly. However, as much she enjoys pretending in her mind that she is somewhere else living another life, she recognizes she must still be practical. Thus, she boards the express bus to make up for the time she spent wandering in her thoughts to arrive at work on time. 

Thus is the constant battle a dreamer must endure every single waking moment. By simply existing, a dreamer, by her own fanciful nature, must fight against the very nature of reality, because reality is nothing if not practical. Time spent is time lost, and a dreamer cannot survive in this mechanical world if she does not fight against the natural inclination of spending time with her mind wandering away from her body. Perhaps, you think, this kind of person does not belong in this world. Perhaps, in this logic, a dreamer is doomed from the beginning.

If you told her what you think, then, in her humble opinion, she would agree with you.