Good morning

New York mornings are kindest when you get up before everyone else, when you can let the light in without the sound. They are the sweetest when you went to bed at 9pm, an impossibility when that’s the time you finally walk through your door and hop in the shower and you still need to eat dinner. My perfect morning and my perfect evening do not want to coexist, and the night wins every time. I snooze my alarm at least three times every morning, rolling out of bed at the last second: the smallest window in which I can wash my face, brush my teeth, drink water, put on sunscreen and make up that will wear off throughout the day. I’ve been trying to make breakfast more often with varying success, to buy coffee less when I have grounds at home. When friends want to meet up, I schedule breakfast to get my ass out of bed at a reasonable hour. I try to go to a morning yoga class once or twice a week, even though I cancel when my alarm goes off about 85% of the time. My therapist recently moved away from the city and now we use Zoom on Thursday mornings. I spend my appointments eating breakfast and drinking coffee in bed.

My favorite mornings are the jet lagged ones. Not the zombied, knocked-out-cold after flying 18 hours from Asia kind of mornings, but the got-back-in-the-early-evening from across the Atlantic, crashed, and now it’s 6am and I’m waking up without an alarm clock kind. It feels better than most things.

I am not, nor have I ever have been, a morning person, and it’s not for lack of years spent waking up before 5am to jump in a cold pool. I hear this a lot from old teammates, that they are morning people because they got used to it, to which I say bullshit.

M is a morning person, and worse, he’s a morning person who doesn’t need coffee or any other form of caffeination, never needed an external stimulant, he just started doing it one day in high school, biking for miles and miles before school. Now he crawls over me, still dead to the world, to run what I would consider my long run for the week. He leaves for work as I’m dragging my ass out of bed.

That being said, I like my quiet mornings. I like my mornings slow, preferably on the beach. I find I’m magically a morning person when I cross the Pacific, but only for the two weeks when I’m there before my body can fully adjust. I love the idea of waking up right before sunrise, watching it come up over the horizon slowly, then all at once. I love the idea of walking into the waves with fins and snorkeling gear or a surfboard, and I like it in practice too, even at 6am. I tried convincing M that we should move to the Rockaways before surf season next year, which he briefly considered until he realized his commute would take an hour and a half. Maybe one day.

There was a time in a different city when I would roll out of bed and onto a mat and move along to a basic morning sequence before making myself oatmeal and chai and reading before I went to work. When it was warm, I would sit on the porch, maybe go for a walk around the neighborhood before hopping into my car and driving through the trees to the water where I worked. I would frequently slip out for an hour or two at a time to walk along the river, sit in the sunshine in the afternoon. I was so discontent in DC, and when I look back, it’s hard to remember why, other than the fact I just wasn’t at home in myself yet. But I do miss those mornings.

I believe an ideal world exists in which I wake up with enough time to think, enough time to pray, enough time to thoughtfully go about my day. I’ve given up on trying to replicate my DC mornings because I’ve realized that mornings, no matter how private they might seem, are a collaboration between you and the place you wake up in. Certain mornings can only exist in a Berlin hotel, a cabin upstate, or in a hut on an island in the Pacific. New York will never let me have my DC mornings, nor should it. It’s only taken me three years to understand why. It will probably take another three to figure out what kind of morning New York wants for me.

All my love,
Kara

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