Every morning, when the alarm went off, she would sit up in bed, pull a pillow onto her lap, grab her journal, and begin to write. Of course, what I’ve left out here is that she always opened the curtain so she could see the street lights turn off one by one as the sun rose and that her husband always turned on the white, faux alabaster lamp on the small stool she’d made into a side table. While she wrote, a cup of hot water, sometimes with lemon, sometimes with honey, would appear on the table next to her, not by any magical occuarnce, but by the husband who always turned on the lamp.
This was the start of every monring. These were the quiet little bits they took pleasure in before the dawning of athletic clothes and the sounds of small voices coming from the room across the hall in their small apartment as the children woke up for the day.