Tea Time

Morning is my favorite moment. I love waking to the idea that my dreams are real. The man with his bubble farting skunk and the woman with a million colorful scarves twirling on a barber shop chair come by my house once and a while to share a pot of tea. Flying through the loop of red stone is just another daily routine as I wonder what happened to that man who fell in love with the mermaid in that purple sea. Perhaps the scientist with the lion head growing from his shoulder knows. Once I blink my eyes a few times, I realize that I've just left a world that exists only in my mind. But it doesn't matter. I'll visit again.

I love the hour between swallowing down an orange thyroid pill and breakfast. It's the only time I explore the Internet, looking up acrylic paintings of the forest and checking my e-mail to see if Bayou finally returned my inquiry. Even if they didn't, I love looking out the upstairs window at the frosty cars sliding behind the snowbanks. Sometimes I know the person sitting as a silhouette in the front seat, and I wonder where they're going. Perhaps off to work. Hopefully to share the morning with a friend.

Then there's the meal. The heavy, round bowl of morning heaping with blueberries, banana, cereal and soy milk while dark roast coffee sputters from my basement bedroom. I read books. Poetry is the best side dish for breakfast. But sometimes I flip through issues of Isotope and read about birds and radiation and the man who fell in love with nature.

Only the hum of the refrigerator, the purr of a cat, a knocking at the top of the stairs as Elmer itches his floppy ear on his bed by the closet door echoes in an otherwise empty house. Morning is the moment that I truly love people. The drifts of snow arching up the glass door show their blue bellies, their little secrets, and suddenly something inside me, too, opens.