I woke up, thinking, whirling.

It was blue and quiet outside, but spinning in my mind— and my usual counters were not slowing anything down. I thought of this and considered that, then I checked the time. To my dismay, it was only three-thirty. An awkward time that was between being not late enough to reasonably start the day such as four-thirty, and not quite early enough to give another go at sleeping, such as two-thirty.

After a bit more ruminating and detailing of the ceiling, I decided to stop thinking reasonably and that I didn’t like to wait for anyone in my life, and I didn’t need to wait for the sun either.

I pulled out my laptop and began planning for the day. A song came on that was reminiscent of my early travels, so I wrote a poem. I then looked at flights to the Rockies. Oh no, I thought, I know this trope too well. Before I knew it, I sent a message to my brother asking if he would hike them with me (He’s a logistics guy, and we’ve concluded the springtime would be best).

It began to rain.

I love the rain. I watched the Texas rainstorms as early as age two and three, blistering the asphalt like little spikes it would come down so hard. Little me would cry out in excitement, jump up and down and smile big. I admit— still do this.

At this moment, I remembered the night prior (only a few hours ago), I had read the descriptor banana on a scented product, and decided at that moment that it would be really nice to have banana yogurt in the morning. The morning is now, I remembered. I threw on a raincoat and pocketed my wallet, took off to the only grocer that was open: the Trade Fair a quarter mile down Steinway.

Morning Astoria in Queens was sweet, supple, with rich reds of brick and an overshadow of blue. There was maybe three people I passed by, and I wondered where they were going, why they were up. Why was I up? I didn’t think too much on that, I was just happy to be alive on these damp and misty sidewalks.

I walked with no music and considered my life questions that always seem complicated in regular hours but was clear in sight then, like still forest water, untainted by all my shades I was usually looking through. I thought about that and I thought about nothing. I felt my body wake with every early morning step.

I traded cash for yogurt and bananas, then dipped into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee: black. I was among the few who rose this early for their jobs: construction, sanitation maybe. Travelers? At another point not so long ago, I was there, too: a train arriving into a new city at some ungodly hour, myself and a coffee to accompany the rest of the way. There was a man in neon hunched in the corner watching a video, maybe waiting for a ride to meet him there, to pick him up. There was a man who I saw at the grocer minutes before; I didn’t see what he bought there, or what kind of coffee he got here. Since moving to the city, I’ve made the habit of not noticing these things so much anymore. Maybe just being a woman, I didn’t like being observed back.

After a bit, I was done being brave with coffee black and asked for a bit of cream. They gave me the blueberry to try, my favorite.

I pulled out my notecard and pen, essentials that were always in my pocket. I think I wrote something about liminal spaces but I seemed to have lost the card on my way back. Maybe it slipped out of my pocket and onto the concrete. Maybe it’s lying in a thin puddle mulled into the ground by morning commuters. Liminal, transitions, passerby’s, the irony of it.

I think it’s funny that a common step in a more thoughtful creative pursuit is when you start talking liminal. Moments and time between— a past and an unformed future. A transitory space with an assumption of human involvement, linked in some way but not directly present. An Eggleston. Why are we so intrigued by it? Us quiet introspectives cherish this space dearly. We have so much time to sit in the reflective pool and wonder the possibilities until we ourselves are ready to step through and interact with the world again.

As an observer, I also think that seeing a person existing there before me… is almost too much, too interesting— an essence that can never be defined in a photograph or a piece of writing. Maybe the only thing we can get close to defining are the physical items they’ve left behind: roads, fences, a hammer on a workbench, an old shoe on a curb. Things that are more concrete, as opposed to the infinitely complex individual.

I breathed it all in, my mind was clear. I had no business being up this early, but I was there and I was gifted for it. All to myself, I had a quiet morning.

I remember when I started giving myself these moments: the sacred minutes or hours seated comfortably alone, somewhere, with no one I knew, no interaction with any world outside of little moments between me and a stranger, our own secrets exchanged before they would walk on with their own life-story. To think, it was only several years ago when I found out about this joy. Back then, it had this overtone of excitement, for I had not yet discovered peace. While I do still feel a layer of wonder about this feeling— the sort of ethereal beauty in the air of it— I now claim these moments much more often in my life, and I simply just come back to it as a feeling of knowing, like sitting comfortably into my childhood sofa again.

But this life is positively, undoubtedly exciting, and I’m so often whisked in the whirl of living in it, absorbed by the rush of the city, of friends, of events, of a career. As I love the mornings, I so love the night, too, which is where the thrill tends to live. And so, I forget these early mornings exist until the day I wake up and decide to claim one again.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite openings in a novel:

The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still to new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during chiildhoo and adolescense, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occuyping, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving. The present, we realize, eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world’s incessant movement, fleeting the second we look away and leaving scarecely a trace of its passing, or this at least is how it usually seems in retrospective, when in the next brief moment of consciousness, the next occasion we are able to hold things still, we realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent. Events take place, moods ebb and flow, and people and situations come and go, but looking back during those rare junctures in which we ar, for whatever eason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent whlile everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life.

— Anuk Arudpragasm, A Passage North

I sip my coffee, I walk back home. But I forgot my grocery bag so I carry my items by hand and between my arm and torso. It began to rain again— harder this time. I misstep into a puddle. I spill my coffee on my fingers. I want to get home and shower hot, I want to be comfortable again. But then I remember where I am and how I’ve never seen the rainy streets of Astoria at five in the morning before.

and then I hear the birds.