mornings in between peace and sheets

I like waking up slowly, mornings spent in bed reading about far-away places and far-away times. In travel magazines I've been meaning to read and in the bedside table book containing letters I've been reading, a few at a time, for years, there's no pressure to respond to e-mails immediately or else face the guilt of my inefficiency.

I like it when there's a chill outside. It doesn't matter to me if it's sunny or cloudy, I want to wear a cozy sweater and be warm through the woven fibers and cold when the air touches my skin.

Mornings that start out with a "Don't worry" and murmurs under rumpled sheets. A half-asleep kiss, and then some more, with a "Thanks, my keys were on the counter, like you said. See you tonight." Red-mug-mornings. They're different from big yellow mug mornings, which require more tea than the red mug can hold. Gulping hot tea is simply strange and uncalled for on a red mug morning.

I like mornings with space to reminisce back to the spring, when planning this summer, we thought, This is going to be the best summer ever. And then in the summer, when we lived between the raindrops and the oppressive heat. We were at the mercy of whims of weather, the buffer zone of guaranteed air conditioning indoors nonexistent. It made me miss my own city most. It's a city that will leave you standing at the bus stop in tortuous heat and unbearable cold, but will grant you a careless breeze every now and then. And sweeping across sweat, that breeze is significant.

Now, this summer a distant memory, everybody looks at pictures of places they left their hearts. Personally, I question the distance between the mountains and the Holocaust. Could such unfathomable beauty and terror really have become intertwined in the same place? Not in the same place, of course, but to me, both felt ubiquitous and pervasive. But isn't that the way it always is? Beauty and terror. Next-door neighbors. Beauty and terror. Simultaneously parasitic to one another- in science, we describe a parasitic organism as one that cannot live without the resources of another. Beauty and terror. One in the same.

Looking forward, as though we have some semblance of organized thought. As though chronology has any sort of meaning when, really, we look back on moments, without context. We are unforgiving of ourselves when we forget the sequence of events that led us to where we are now, but at the time, we had our reasoning. And so we should never forget, but we do and will continue. Forgetting. People think it is specific moments that define them, and will even go so far as to pinpoint examples, as though each of those moments did not involve many others before them. As though years' worth of habits can be broken in a single moment. As though context doesn't matter. As though context isn't the only thing that matters.

 I like to think that in the cool, in the nonchalance, of the Messy-Hair Morning, it's okay to breathe despite the fact that terrible things happen. It's okay to believe that there are moments that can stand separate of all other time around it. In these mornings, refusing to reflect upon anything at all that is happening around me is still lazy; but for now, that's okay. I like to believe that the morning can handle these things, for this is the time of day that "I'll try" is still accompanied by "of course."

[I took these pictures at the Fotoplastikon Museum in Warsaw, Poland]