morning
Sometimes in the mornings I wake up for work very early, and R is still too much asleep to manage a goodbye when I leave. On many days our schedules line up so we can manage coffee together, the percolator fizzing on the stove and releasing a succulent caffeinated scent that props the eyes open. Our semi-coherent morning conversations are about dreams just ended or the books we fell asleep reading. Such mornings mean a lot to me because I easily feel isolated and disoriented with no one to talk to, which is most mornings and days. Having a boyfriend helps me stay rooted in the present, even though sometimes it is also a burden, this having-someone.
On alone-mornings I climb into the cycling gear needed to keep me dry/illuminated/warm, eat a half-assed breakfast, dash on some lipstick to feel dressed-up although it will be licked off by the time I navigate traffic and arrive at work. I dream my way through the faked urban wilderness of the Greenway, swerve around slow-moving buses on Commercial Drive and envy the few people I see populating the JJ Bean at 6 in the morning, absorbed in books or papers and warmly getting caffeinated behind windows dripping with condensation. I hang counter-intuitive rights that go contrary to the bike lane and so earn me some honks – but the buttonhooks conveniently lead me into the heart of Vancouver’s shit district, the downtowneastside – all one breathless word of paranoid projection and cliche. Where I do have to dodge minivans, SUVs, a gamut of family vehicles driven by furtive men with their hoods pulled up, suburban family men with a need/taste for winter a.m. prostitutes in clonky Payless boots, crack acne, thin jeans caked around thin thighs and a harsh, begging glow in their eyes.
And I arrive on time, with 15 or 10 minutes to spare but no one notices or says hello. I just take up my post: 4th floor, a quarter-acre of hallway and bathrooms and a smoking room and 1 weak library conisting of Danielle Steels and cowboy westerns that smell like mould. As a housekeeper I am not one of the ‘looked-at’ woman of society, I am the ‘back-drop’ person, someone who is invisible until something isn’t done. Someone who doesn’t take it personally when residents piss with the door open, piss on the floor, spill their coffees as they race up the stores in a jacked-up delirium; they ash their endless cigarettes all over the floor with a demented-offended “Fuck YOU” if you say anything.
And I ride through the dark streets with the city neon providing more illumination than any threat of dawn. It’s still dark and I am going to work at a ‘casual’ job. that is, a position that belongs to someone else and I’m just making ends meet while they go on holiday or call in real- or fake-sick. And my own impulse to write-off the day is very strong. I would like to call in sick and be drunk by 8 am on mimosas, or some other acceptable morning beverage at a breakfast dive, as I write in my notebook. I’d like to read my book for an uninteruppted 3 hour span with my coffee getting cold beside me. Wouldn’t we all?
There is something threatening about the touch of dawn on the massed-but-not-yet-bleeding rainclouds. In the morning I am always reminded of a loneliness that I’ve always felt haunted by, a feeling that threatens to shout gangway and trample my head. A creeping, sneaking loneliness, and it’s nothing so eloquent as ‘solitude.’
