I get up in the morning with Squire and have an egg on toast, usually a fried egg but I'm trying to be a little healthy so these days a boiled egg, sliced using a kitchen gadget. It's a popup toaster; I would prefer a toaster oven for almost everything except toast. I make coffee in a French press; I used to use a drip coffee maker but found that cleaning it was annoying plus the look of horror on my dearest coffee lover's face after she took a sip convinced me to upgrade. Milk and sugar these days, needing the extra sweetness in a bitter world, but usually just black. I put a spoonful of homemade cherry syrup in a glass of water and use that to choke down vitamin pills, including vitamin D which doesn't make a perceptible difference but maybe it makes some difference anyway. We watch 20 minutes of television while we eat breakfast as neither of us is very chatty in the morning. News commentary is great, good sitcoms are better.
After breakfast, dishes, and maybe tea, and then all the social media stuff that I should cut back on and don't. Someone's wrong on the internet and I can't start working until I've seen it all. I don't read the news regularly anymore because it messes me up; sometimes I fall down an internet hole of researching something meaningless but at least it doesn't leave me with catatonic nihilism. Every day I think I should quit and every day I read at least one thing that makes me want to keep going, keep connecting. The traveling bookstore off on another adventure. My friend's daughter's Halloween costume ideas. An article about grief. People I have loved and am far away from, people I haven't met and have come to love, remember when we had to make dates to meet by mail?
Then work. Work and then a snack and then work and green tea, a cigarette break, and then work more. I love what I do although lately I feel like it's harder and harder to focus, my brain keeps skittering off into different directions, as if trying to swim through a heavily salted sea, constantly bouncing back up to the surface, on my back watching seagulls and clouds despite my desire to sink beneath the surface, tranquility and coral and marvelous fish always beyond my reach.
Sometimes I meet a friend for lunch and sometimes for afternoon coffee. It's the best possible season now, fall that's really fall this year, with leaves dying in all colors of a fire and leaving marvelously crunchy piles to kick through. Also scarves. In May when we went to New York for a wedding I bought a leather coat in a secondhand store and every time I wear it I am with my sister, my son, my now-married friends in love, Adirondack chairs. The buttons on the coat are a little loose and I should sew them on better at some point, though I'm not sure if special needles or something are required; I've never sewn through leather. In the afternoon if I'm not out I send invoices, check the internet pools to see if I've caught any fish, nap if I can. Do laundry, write email, stay useful.
In the evening I finish the work I dithered over during the day or sometimes I go out. There are friends who can't drink me under the table but then I can't seem to get them under the table either so we sit there with the bottle on the table in front of us and tell each other increasing truths until one of us realizes it's well past time to go home and goes. Some evenings there are open mic nights or theater rehearsals that may or may not involve some or several of the same friends and the same realizations. Some evenings I laugh so hard I think I might not stop, and some evenings I cry the same way.
At night I clean up because it's nice to wake up in a clean home. I brush my teeth and put on enough night-cream to resemble a 50s cartoon of a woman. I fall asleep as soon as I've packed the pillows around me or I fall asleep reading and wake up 30 minutes later to turn off the light. Sometimes I wake up in the night and lie there paralyzed by anxiety I can't name for an hour or two; sometimes I sleep through until the sun filters through the cracks between the curtains.
We changed the clocks last night. There is nothing that interesting about my life, but it seems very satisfying to me. I feel like the world is going to end soon and I try not to think about it but it's a factor in some decisions: If the world ends, will I regret having not done this? Mostly my life is things that I have chosen, things I want. And I get that you don't want it, because if you wanted it you'd only need to reach out your hand. I am really usually okay with that, because it's hardly new, but sometimes it stings behind my eyes and I look at my day from the outside and think: What's not to love? Don't answer that.