A Taste for Mornings

Six-thirty, and the first thing he does when he opens his eyes is brew coffee. As the kettle begins to arch its back, the photo she sent last week comes to mind. Yellow chrysanthemums she'd bought on impulse, set in a jar in her kitchen. Season by season, she sends him a morning of her own. In spring, rapeseed-flower tea in a glass; in summer, the sip of iced americano she shared; then the autumn chrysanthemums; and in winter, the green smell rising from a hallabong peel. She tends to her mornings the way you would a person. He envies that. The coffee he's just brewed tastes good, but somehow this morning too he holds it in one hand, only half looking at it. Until the faint watermark it leaves on his wrist shows, he looks at her photo again. What was she feeling when she turned on her phone this morning and sent this? Wiping the screen with a finger, it seems, is becoming the one taste he can recognize in his own mornings.