Morning Routines

So many met while traveling are do’ers; do this, do that, go there, get there, move here, tour groups, shuttles, packs on backs, hustle, move, pinpoints and places, get up, get out, get home, go out, get home, pass out, get up, get out, next, repeat.

I need the sounds, the smells, the senses bounced around. The places and destinations and itineraries are not for me. I like to slide cloth curtains apart, crack open the saloon-door wood-windows in the wall of my minuscule twin-bed-and-a-desk enclave early in the morning, before the see’ers and do’ers wake from seeing and doing last night, and let it all come in. Pick up the scent of the fire stoking the neighbor’s breakfast stove on the other side of the concrete block dividing wall topped with razor wire and broken glass; see the black smoke from the bus exhausts as they groan by outside the door and hear their balding tires squish along the stone streets as they start terrorizing passengers and pedestrians both. Car horns come to life slowly in the mornings, the occasional whimper, prior to overtaking the air by eight o’clock. The habitants of the third world rise earlier, but move en masse much later, slower.

They’re right.