When I wake up in the morning...

I stretch and gaze at the ceiling through the mesh of pale green netting. When I first came back home every mosquito in the neighbourhood sent out an email...Fresh blood! Now two years later, I only get bitten when there is a crowd of them or during the day by those pesky dengue carrying critturs with white banded legs.

I still share my bed with piles of books, of magazines I use to coax my mind to focus, or sometimes to direct a dream to solve an issue I am struggling with. The knowledge is all there, just sometimes the pages seem stuck down a little. I prime the pump with words and concepts borrowed from others and let the miracle go to work.

I watch the ceiling and wait for thought to start, to find the flavour of the day. To settle my soul back into flesh - how do I know if I am alive? I am awake and when I sleep I dream or live a bright alternate life of conversations and impossible tasks accomplished, sleep is only rarely the dark well of unconsciousness I know from anesthesia and I believe my soul immortal so if at night I just change one state for another how do I know if the flesh will move come morning? It is always a moment of wonder when I feel that breath, that movement, that tiny ache or irritation of the skin as I rejoin the world of day.

The bed will move no more, I found a weakened brace that let the corners of one end splay just enough to shift the balance and position, a tilt that slid the mattress in fact but not to casual view. Details and attention hold the key to much in our quotidian patterns woven moment to moment in our doubts and exuberant discoveries, question and answer that lead and lead to more questions if we dare.

I get out of bed, feet split by sharp knives of arthritis on their first touch to earth, sweet agony that lasts an hour, maybe less. All the bones I broke and cracked while dancing make me pay and I pay gladly for the joy and passion that I drowned in daily over many years. I wander from the bedroom to the bathroom, hand through hair grooms my head, toothbrush wet and pasted, tap turned off, and I brush on the way to the kitchen to fill the kettle. The feral cats look up from the chaise and stretch in flirtatious curves, their daily dance for breakfast, squeezing their eyes closed in kitty kisses to seduce me. Already done, but their self serving affection for me is a welcome balm against the waking spirit.

I shall go to work today, the clamp of illness has eased its grip around my ribs and when I say good morning to the cats I do not croak. Yesterday it was four hours before my voice held a shape with any certainty. So, I am well and will shower soon, exchanging simple cotton casual for corporate black over a flash of sea shadowed turquoise and ballet flats in pewter.

My first cup of tea has warmed its way down, around and hunger stirs, demanding my attention. And I must feed the furnace of my being to support the words growing in the channels of imagination waiting to be born here or there on paper, to be spoken out loud and carried to some waiting ear, somewhere.