A Window Set Low

Sleep spread out in the smell of an unfamiliar blanket. Between the tightly drawn curtains, the window had turned a fresh blue. Not the clock but the movement of dust drifting through the room made my eyes swell open. Instead of the bright pressure of the familiar alarm, a bird perched on the balcony window frame tilts its head and meets my eyes. That small life sits with the orange light, not yet spread wide, on its back. When a strand of air carried in through the open window brushes the edge of the pillow, the margins of a map whose ink hasn't quite dried quietly open their eyes. Somewhere on the unfamiliar street, the clang of a metal ring dropping to the ground, the intermittent siren of a bicycle far off, tangle into ripples of a foreign tongue. A morning in a strange land is somehow all brightness and strangeness. At the hour when a familiar day should begin, the welcome face who would take on all those routines is not in this house. I stir a dark brown powder from the back of the cupboard into water and let a mouthful spill over the rim of the cup. Yesterday's coffee, unwilling to let something like this slide, wets my throat. Like the sound of a sofa unfolding, the window hanging there fluttering as it cuts the wind, the damp smell of dust pushing indoors, none of it is welcome. Morning light stretches long across the single cup of water I drank standing. The friction of countless footsteps hurrying toward the workday, the speed of a bride cutting through the air in fits and starts, a foreign morning still too early to listen to. Only now do I think of that dark red pomegranate tea, and alone, becoming a song, I wet my throat.