Not yet fifty and single again - J

Morning

“This is a story about love”, he said. “This is a story about murder. Are you ready for it?”, he asked. “I am”, she said.

Morning
When my alarm went off this morning, the usual time at six thirty, I woke up as a single man. I have been waking up as a single man for over seven months now…did I get used to it? Did I have to get used to it? I don’t even know. I can’t remember how it was to wake up as a married man. I guess this is one of the things I had taken for granted after so many years. 

Of course there are differences. I sleep in a sleeping bag, as I don’t care to buy bed sheets. I like sleeping in a sleeping bag…now there is nobody I need to explain it to, I just do, and that’s fine.
Before I didn’t. In the early years of marriage, I would never even have considered it. The best thing imaginable about sleeping with your loved one is cuddling up, spooning up, lying in each other’s arms, breathing in each other’s neck, smelling each other, feeling each other’s warmth…

In cold winter-months, jumping in the bed that was pre-warmed by one of us, was pure bliss. Only our noses would stick out from under the thick blankets. 
In summertime, naked, with only a sheet covering the lower part of our bodies. As long as possible holding each other, until it all got too sweaty.

Every morning I would wake up, open my eyes and look at my wife, admire her face, her nose, her ears, the tiny spots on her upper lip…for me that was pure happiness. 

It stayed like this for a long time. But slowly things changed. It became too hot in summer, too sweaty. One of us needed more space for arms to be stretched. Time to look at my loved one in the morning became too scarce, I needed to get up, get dressed, get to work…and she didn’t seem to respond to any signs from my side to make sweet morning love, when both our bodies were still warm and we both smelled of each other. In the beginning, this was one of the times for us where we liked to make love, in the morning. The longer the marriage lasted, the longer we seemed to need to get into the right mood at the same time. Love making became lonely masturbation. 

But now…I wake up in a sleeping bag. Not a big fluffy one, but a cotton bag. Nice and warm enough and not sweaty, perfect for the tropics, where I live. 
I get up and go to the toilet first. I look at myself in the mirror. Not recommendable at my age in the morning. Wrinkles are more pronounced, the face still sleepy, the body still showing the traces of bed, sheet, and more wrinkles where they never used to be. But…I don’t mind. It’s a body well lived, well used, well maintained but well scarred, well entertained, well loved. It is my body. It bears the traces of my life. So, I look at it. 

My usual morning ritual is to get out and meet my “boys”, my dogs. I love them. They are happy to see me, jump up, run, bark and lick my face. It makes me happy. Then I meet my cats, a different story all together. Reproachful looks asking: who are you? What do you want? Where is my food? Hmm, I guess that’s just projection. They look at me and see me for what I am: another creature, for them to ignore, to enjoy, and I am sure if they would have been bigger, to devour. 

I get their plates, boxes, and whatever I use to feed them. I mix the food for them while they groan, bark, beg, moan…the beautiful sounds of the morning. As I said, I love them. 

After this is done, its time for me. My coffee. I am so happy that I am a coffee addict. That is truly one of the pleasures in my life, being a coffee junky. A while ago I thought: what will I miss when I die? The first thing that came to my mind was…my morning coffee. I will really miss having my first coffee in the morning after I die, and that’s no lie. 

My favorite brew is from the small Bialetti espresso-pot. The traditional tool for the best coffee. Using ground beans, preferably local. Once brewed, plenty of sugar, and strong. It must be strong. I hate coffee that resembles tea. Coffee is coffee, tea is tea. If you don’t know that, it means you are a tea drinker and shouldn’t try to make coffee.
Fried eggs on toast, reading the newspaper on my tablet. And that’s my ritual. 

I shower, brush my teeth, get dressed…I need time to get to work. I can’t just jump out of bed, in my clothes, throw something in my mouth and off to work or wherever it is you need to go. I need time for myself. This has become easier now I am by myself. I don’t have to be quiet, to avoid waking up my wife, who was not a morning person, which I am. I can fully enjoy my morning. To put it differently, do whatever I want to wake up. That’s nice. If I want to sing, I sing. If I want to be quiet, so be it. 

I am not sure, I don’t think there is much else to say about my mornings in general. And this particular morning nothing really special happened. Rituals completed, ready to go…

Except…except one thing. I woke up with a trace of excitement and restlessness in my body. In my stomach to be precisely. The reason is that I know that this evening, I have an appointment with a nice lady.

Appointment, now you can really see that I was married all those years and haven’t got a clue how to pick up afterwards. I have a date. Yes, a date. Someone I have met a little while ago. Intriguing. Somebody that I am interested in. Not only because she is good looking, which she is. But that’s not really the reason. The real reasons are some conversations we had.  
So…this morning is different, as for the first time in a long while, I have a date….