Quiet Mornings

The house was still except for the tags on the cat’s collar banging against the food bowl in the next room. Clank. Clank. Clank.

She wished to dissolve into nothingness, stillness, not even quiet breaths but total non-being awareness. It wasn’t about living or dying. Only stillness.

The house was hers most mornings as her wife continued sleeping. It was what twenty-three years had brought them to. Mornings were hers, and in the night she left the house to her wife, the night-owl, who stayed up watching movies or reading long past a sensible bedtime. They found wonder at opposite ends of the clock.

A bird sang its morning call right outside the living room. In her dreams the night before, she pumped her arms and took off flying, soaring through the sky in full power. Then the dream morphed and a father thought his child had a brain infection because of why? Being special. Nobody could possess those powers under normal brain health. Weird shift.

After a week away, she was reminded how nobody saw the world through her lens, just as she didn’t see through theirs. The whole damn thing was made up anyhow. This life, this living. Illusion upon illusion. Her night dreams were more real than the waking hours.

The small, round red clock tick-tocked just beneath the thrum of nature’s noises coming through from outside. A whisp of breath came softly from her dog’s nostrils.

She’d made fresh almond milk and was now staring out the window waiting for the pulp to dry in the oven. Please, she whispered, just a few more minutes, a few needed breaths of silent space awareness.

The timer for the stove beeped loudly insistently until she moved from her spot on the couch. Silence would have to wait. She just hoped the noise didn’t wake up her wife. Her sanity depended on it.

Andrea Mai is the author of multiple novels, novellas, and nonfiction works. Every day is new. She is also an energy healer and meditation, mindfulness, and manifestation guide. Living her purpose, living her dream.