I slept in—I was on the phone with a friend last night, and we talked about many things. I had slept in, and the same window I left open to make the room airy and cool had turned it muggy. The trick was to wake up on time to close the window. If you slept in as the day got hotter, you worked up a sweat even in your sleep. Even sleep is exhausting work sometimes. At first, I was a little irritable because of this somewhat expected delay in how my day would go. Then, as I stood with my hands at the kitchen counter, water bubbling in a kettle on my left and a shot of espresso slowly dropping into the cup on my right, I thought, this is what it is to be in the middle of happiness.
I took my coffee to the desk and opened the window again. Humid or not, there was no replacement for the fresh air of the day. Before I began writing, I sat staring at the white wall before me, remembering. It was no particular thing to remember, only how we remember the colour. I remembered a blur of lavender and blue and grey and green and red and yellow. It has been a colourful life; there has been a lot of colour, and the canvas looks so empty still. There is so much to fill. I did not think of this in a panic or in haste to fill it, but I was grateful. There was so much to live for still. The same gratefulness had carried over from my evening at the patio yesterday as I sipped my coffee by myself.
I believe some part of me always knew I would be here, in these exact days of my life, not in respect of what I do with them but with how I feel in them. I believe some part of me always had an inkling about it all, about there being someplace, far away from where I was, where I was at an unmatched peace. Time is the only distance. That was the part I did not know at the time. So, I went to a thousand places, only to return to the same town I grew up in; only to realise I have been here forever, and I don’t know a thing about it, for I have never looked. I have always been in a hurry to leave.
It occurred to me yesterday when on a walk, I saw a tree near the school I spent years going to, day by day. I knew there was a tree there. I never realised it had flowers.