How completely curious for me to consider scheduling in some timeless time, but I do seem to do this. Later, The Muse will rise and Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat will decide it's past her breakfast time, frantically yowling as if her last night's supper never quite took. Before then, just after sleep slips from my always tenuous grasp, my timeless time resides, inviting me inside before even the earliest bird rouses. The deck fountain trickles. Not even a distant hint of a breeze tries to seize this day yet. I open windows and doors, sticking my head into the outside, sniffing myself suspiciously awake.

I never take my breakfast first. The first few hours of these mornings seem best served by continuing the fast. Once time once again overtakes me, I can manage an egg and toast, both of which require time to cook. Even the few scant minutes an egg requires have not yet rustled out of bed. Toast would be hopeless without time ticking off scorching seconds.

I awaken disoriented every blessed morning. I might have, twenty years ago and more, opened my eyes hungrily, even greedily, focused upon some great, grand goal. Now, I crack my slumber chrysalis as if new born, uncertain of even my most fundamental rituals. I sometimes forget to make myself coffee. I have to head back upstairs to fetch forgotten glasses, slippers, or something, as if I have no history yet, ineptly making one up instead.

I do remember that I'm a writer, though I do not always find myself writing during my timeless time. I'm more likely to read, and read as if I've awakened up suffocating from cluelessness, aching to learn something, anything. I more often catch myself watching out the darkened window as if emitting some sort of radio waves rather than taking in the view. The view ain't much in the dark. I sometimes wonder what I'm doing then, but I almost never know.

Perhaps my timeless time serves as an extension of my sleep, every bit as fitful and dreamless, only slightly more self-aware. I am certainly there, or more properly here, though not accountably so. I know very little for certain right then and have nothing worth asserting out into the world. Bowen The Neighbor Boy asked me yesterday if I was an engineer. (His dad's an engineer.) I told him that I was more the kind who rides in the caboose, pulled along rather than designing and driving the machine.

Later, I will engage in what passes for work, which will pass rather like the time encapsulating it passes. I only rarely speak of the timeless space I seem to insist upon inhabiting each morning. Most seem not so achingly sweet as these mid-July spaces, each, though, seemingly somehow essential.

©2016 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #PureSchmaltz, #MorningMissive