early rising

I woke up yesterday morning, as I do every morning, to the sound of my alarm clock at 6am and blearily noticed there was a new text message time-stamped 5:45am from my Ari-love saying simply, "Are you awake?"

I called her immediately and we went on to have one of our crazy discussions, this time primarily about the sudden collapse of her and her partner's dojo plans the day before, the drama and trauma that ensued, and the sudden discovery of a new and better place for their dream-cum-soon-to-be-a-reality.

I put water on for tea as we said our first hellos, stood by the stove waiting for the teapot to move on from wheeze to gurgle to full-blown whistle, poured the water and spooned out the honey and finally curled up on my desk chair, as is my wont, as I listened to her tale of woe and redemption. (No dramatics here, I swear, just keep on walking.)  And then I happened to glance at the clock in the lower right-hand corner of my trusty little computer and saw that it read 6:03am. I did a double-take, thinking somehow my computer had gone slow or something, before realizing that in fact I had been woken up by Ari's 5:45am text message, not my 6am alarm clock.

And I smiled because I was so pleased to be talking to my Ari-love, and so pleased that my infamous tendency for early-rising is what had allowed this conversation to happen in the first place, and so pleased that my quick-to-waken self had been roused by her text message, thus giving us an extra fifteen minutes of talk time before I had to cut us short and get ready for work.