Coffee for dinner

The coffee is stirring within me.

A pen sits silently in my hand, wobbling over tender fingers tired from rubbing at red eyes. I blink and the thoughts clank and creep past the gray folds and blood vessels and nothing quite makes sense at this hour. It is the hour of dreams even when I am too wide awake, wishing for sleep or coherent thought but achieving neither.

I am not really a dog person but the thought of a mutt at my feet, furry belly curled around my toes, warm breath at my ankles, it makes me reach down to pet the ghost of a late night domestic desire.

My arms are covered in blisters from an allergy I didn't know I had. Pink crests form over the pale and freckles, fill with water from my inland/inskin reservoir. I marvel and scratch at my newly acquired forms. How quickly we change! How malleable and delicate we are!
I wonder which soldiers in my body are calling war on my flesh. Our flesh.

I have dirt under my fingernails (what's new) but I am reminded of the most influential lesson I learned from my farming mentors: Take action. If something isn't growing, replant. If something is sick or rotting, notice what is happening, maybe try to save it or else replant with something else. But no matter what, take action. Don't wait. The bed won't get better with procrastination.
Do something.


It is hot in this room. There is a palm tree and an elephant lamp and a red glass rooster. There are photographs of who I was seven years ago (a whole other person! literally- these cells are not the same. I should have another name now decided by the collective conscious of all these organisms calling this swirling mass (my body) home). There are random blankets and tents perfect for a fort but instead just sitting next to a proper bed, sheets stubbly with beach sand and farm dirt. It is hot because it is summer and there is not a breeze or a breath of AC.

I think of summer in India, girls in the hostel stripped down to underwear in the afternoon heat, laying under fans on beds dumping water too warm to be refreshing on dirt streaked limbs. That is when I started sleeping with arms overhead, a diamond around my skull.

It is not that way here, except I still sleep sometimes with arms up, pins and needles waking me at dawn. It is not even that way now. It is simply 3:30 am in July in San Diego and I am awake and you are (most likely) not.