First attempts are always awkward

May 15, 2009 I decided to get over my fear of failure and at least start something, if not finish it. I have no idea where this is going, but I suppose that's the root of my fear. Do share thoughts/criticisms if you feel so moved. Danke. 

The benevolent hour when the sky reveals neither time nor temperature has the greatest potential. All other hours somehow demand or withdraw their expectations so that our inaction either makes us guilty of squandering the day’s great potential or justifies our lives in lacking any great potential of their own.

This was a benevolent sky that greeted her.

Rolling over towards the light, she knew by the building’s stillness that everyone else still slumbered. The hour demanded no extraordinary or valiant action on her part. She had no sense of urgency, like on the mornings she awoke to a different stillness – a coffee-tinged stillness that meant the others had gone and she was late. She closed her eyes again.

The window was open and rain was falling gently so that a person could be wet through and through before he realized what it was about. It smelled like London but stronger because London was just a memory. This was all just a memory. What time was it? An eggyness wafted from probably next door, or downstairs, or the memory. Or London?

“It’s always raining in my memory of London,” she explains from time to time.

Waking up for real this time, she sits up, noticing it’s not raining here. But someone is cooking eggs, probably downstairs or next door. What a strange joke to be living here with only a layer of wood and sheetrock isolating one tenant’s life from another. Only a flimsy physical divider, but it’s enough to make them strangers. “And we’re all strangers.” She thinks about this a lot.

She’s at the sink now, filling a glass and swallowing the first deep draft. Outside she examines her morning sky for the time and temperature and notices neither. “Well, this is my morning,” she reasons after another swallow. Meanwhile someone else’s alarm startles them from dreaming. “Right, turn your cell alarm off,” she reminds herself. It would no longer be needed. (To be continued...)