When it is just Kate and I alone in the morning, sometimes it is easy to remember why I fell in love.
Kate is crazy and gets up far too early to actually be doing anything productive. Just up to make the coffee and sometimes the eggs and catch the last of the late night infomercials before the news comes on. Because she likes those sorts of things.
I am rarely up this early. For years I have been
up late at night and then into bed for hours after the sun comes up. There are many nights that I don't even make it to the bed, afraid of sliding in and waking her from her slumber, knowledgeable of the fact that waking her up at this hour is giving her permission to start her day now.
So there is always a debate in my head over going to bed or just staying up. And while I would love to choose sleep, next to her, every time, I am much too considerate of her schedule to keep to mine.
It is Friday that I work so hard and come home so
exhausted that I cannot help but want to just collapse into bed, dirty head and all. And so I do. I am asleep before Kate even gets here and by the time I wake up, she has already slipped under the covers and is watching me sleep.
We both take a moment to realize that we had
almost forgotten what it is like to sleep with another body in the bed. Forgotten the easy things like how to share blankets and space as well as forgotten the much harder things like how her body fits closely next to mine.
I start to get up out of bed, uncomfortable, to do my normal nightly things: let her go to sleep, stay up hours on end thinking about her, remember what it was like to be the only one to make her quiet. But this time she does not allow me to get up. She pulls me back slowly and asks me this time to just
stay... And I do.
I find myself in the morning very comfortable to be waking up as early as she does. Before the sunrises, before even the dog has woken up. I had forgotten what it was like to be up this early in the morning, to see a.m. on the clock, to see the last bit of fading darkness before the sky fills up red and orange and yellow.
I have seen every sunset for years. It happens in the prime of my day, when I am available to see it; it comes when I am ready for it.
Does not make me rush, does not make me wait. The sunrise obviously is a different story, something that I have not seen as often in my lifetime as I intended to.
This morning I watched the sun rise, both in the sky and in
Kate's eyes, and I had to take a moment to step back, to remember the words that I was waiting to say. I had forgotten about that moment of beauty when the sun finally breaks through over the horizon and the colors burst out of reds and oranges and into soft yellows and blues. When the birds start to sing and the dew sparkles on grass blades.
I had remembered watching it before but it did not seem like this. Somehow this morning took longer, was more beautiful, was a better sunrise than any other sunrise before.
There is not a bone of tired in me but Kate insists that just this one time we will take the whole day to just sleep in. And so we go back to bed and
nothing happens. Just sleep, body next to body, warm bed, sun shining in through the windows.
When I say nothing happens I mean everything happened just like it was supposed to.