There are few acts more optimistic than attempting meaningful conversation with another human being before coffee.
Some people claim to enjoy this.
I do not trust them.
Our mornings operate according to a fairly strict and long-established domestic choreography.
At the designated time, the apartment slowly fills with tūī birdsong from the Department of Conservation recordings we use as an alarm. Not an aggressive alarm. No beeping. No digital emergency sirens demanding immediate consciousness.
Just the gentle implication that the natural world has resumed and we are, regrettably, expected to rejoin it.
First, Brian is scooped up from the end of the bed and taken through to Joy. This must be handled carefully because if Brian becomes too awake too early, he will follow me downstairs and the sequencing of the morning begins to collapse.
I then head down, as though descending “below stairs”, alone into the kitchen where, obviously, the lighting has already transitioned appropriately for morning occupation.
This matters.
Coffee is made in silence.
No music.
No phone.
No conversation.
No sudden exposure to information suggesting the world continues to contain other people.
The first cup is delivered upstairs to Joy like part of some quietly contractual civilisation agreement.
I then return downstairs to drink my own coffee alone.
Only after the second coffee has been delivered to Joy does Brian usually reappear and accompany me outside for his morning constitutional, having decided enough administrative sleep has occurred to get him through to his 10am power nap.
By the time we return, Joy has materialised downstairs and plated up Brian’s breakfast with a level of quiet care that suggests this process has occurred approximately ten thousand times before.
At this point she often begins talking.
Too soon.
Always too soon.
Not maliciously.
Not excessively.
Merely optimistically.
Because Joy wakes into the world substantially faster than I do.
This is one of the many reasons civilisation depends upon compromise.
She stops.
I finish the second coffee.
The operating system stabilises.
Only then am I properly available for interaction, which usually begins not with conversation but with a brief and deeply unnecessary inspection of the phone to confirm that overnight the world has continued being strange.
Time continually reinforces my suspicion that long-term relationships are built less upon dramatic compatibility and more upon correctly interpreting one another’s startup sequences.
Who requires silence. (Me)
Who requires music. (Her)
Who requires lighting adjustments. (Both, though she doesn’t know it of herself)
Who can tolerate immediate conversation and who must first be slowly acclimatised back into consciousness like a nervous deep-sea organism.
Love, perhaps, is mostly the accumulation of tiny accommodations preserving one another’s ability to exist comfortably inside the day.
Anyway.
The second coffee has concluded.
You may now speak.
— g