On waking

This morning I woke with a stomach ache, an ache that pushed into and from my back, to the sweet morning voices of NPR. They were raising money, I heard, and tried to break through to consciousness and press down into the mattress to exchange my ache for comfort. I heard that Tony Curtis had died, though I can't recall seeing him in any film other than the few minutes of Some Like it Hot that Jedsen showed me years ago. I woke to pain, fundraising, and death, and slanted my body toward the open window and the breeze, warmer now at dawn than it had been the night before.

Watching the sky change in the background of the BB&T skyscraper has become my favorite time of day. The few lights still glowing in the tower, and the pale beige of its stone, high, are transformed into this beautiful reflection or contrast or complement to the dawn. I cannot explain how it looks, only how it feels. It feels like this is the earth, new. There is this thing built by man first illuminated and changed, pulled out of the darkness through my bedroom window, each morning. It is in relief. It is surreal. It is the only living thing.

I want to stay in this moment all morning, swallow the image to keep it. But the sun comes, the blue lightens, and the tower becomes a mere tall building, its lights fading into the everything around it. It now longer glows, is distinct--beyond its height and still blinking red signals.

Snickers claws at my nose. Eats my hair. Stares. She has taken to licking me in the biting sort of way she does when she cleans herself. She leans down to my arm and pretends I am a kitten; I can feel the fronts of her teeth, her tongue pressed up against it and through for the more forceful cleaning. Perhaps this is a sign I should adopt another cat. Or a kitten. I would. And a dog, especially, if I could.

And this adoption thing, though it's been on my mind for some time now (again), is now forefront. I have just begun volunteering at the Spartanburg Humane Society, and last weekend was the orientation where we were told all of the statistics--incoming, outgoing, process, staff. I'm going to start out as a dog-walker, and training should be in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be a dog-walker for a couple of hours a week, though I don't know how I will stand to leave, how I will not have to compulsively walk every dog, how I will not, as I already have just by looking, fall in love with every dog that I walk.

I wake thinking of a morning walk with a dog, my dog. Up at dawn, at that best hour, walking for exercise, walking for happiness, walking for health and companionship. I would do it. But I already brush Snickers away at 6:30 when I should be getting up and ready for the gym. I already let NPR talk on and on without letting them complete, quickly, the job of waking they were sent to do. I already fail at going to the gym every morning now, and, mostly, making it by 7. I already lack the face of the man I love in the orange cast of morning, in the humid afternoon, in the shadowed clouds of sunset.

But I don't wake thinking alone. I wake smiling at dawn and its magic on the tower, the tower I have claimed, and grip the covers back under my neck, my head stretched up to catch the light.