a morning. three wires. the usual.

The song dropped at midnight.

I know this because I was awake at midnight.

I’m always awake at midnight. This is irrelevant. I wasn’t watching the numbers. I was doing something else. There was a thing. A normal thing. Very unrelated. Probably important. Couldn’t tell you what it was because that would ruin the mystery and also because I don’t remember.

By 6:30 in the morning, I had been awake for a while and was no longer doing the unrelated thing.

I was standing in my kitchen eating cereal over the sink and looking at a wall.

The wall didn’t have anything on it.

This also isn’t about the song.

— ✦ —

At some point around seven, I put shoes on.

I want to be clear that this was not a decision I made consciously. My feet made a decision and I was in the body they live in. I’m not responsible for the feet.

Three Wires is forty-five minutes from Saint Static if you take the tram, which I didn’t, because the first tram doesn’t run until eight and I wasn’t waiting for a machine with civic funding and commitment issues.

It’s about twenty minutes on rooftop routes if you know the way.

I know the way.

I’ve known it since I was six. I used to time myself.

I wasn’t timing myself this morning. I wasn’t in a hurry. I was just walking fast because that’s how I walk.

Different thing.

— ✦ —

Baba’s Crumbs opens at seven.

Actually, it opens when Baba opens it, which is usually around six-thirty, before the sign says it’s open, for people who know to come around the side.

I know.

I got there at 7:08.

The sign said CLOSED, but the light was on in the back, which is how you know it’s actually open.

I went around the side.

The back door wasn’t locked. I knocked twice anyway because I’m not an animal.

Baba was at the bread table.

She didn’t look up.

“Shoes,” she said.

I looked down.

My shoes were damp from the rooftop run.

I took them off and left them by the door.

She still didn’t look up. She was doing something with dough that required her full attention, or possibly required nothing and she just didn’t feel like acknowledging me yet.

With Baba, these are the same thing.

I sat on the stool by the window.

The stool is the same stool that has always been there. I don’t know how old it is. It was old when I was small enough to have trouble getting up on it.

I’m not small enough to have trouble anymore.

I still swing my legs a little when I sit on it.

This is not relevant information.

— ✦ —

She didn’t ask why I was there.

This is a Baba thing.

She doesn’t ask questions she already knows the answer to. She says this is efficiency. I think it’s something else. I’ve been thinking about what it is for most of my life and I still don’t have a word for it that isn’t just Baba.

The bakery smelled like it always smells.

Cardamom. Flour. Butter. Something slightly burnt from the second shelf that always runs too hot.

The specific kind of smoke that means she’d been up for a while, which meant she’d been up since before I got there, which meant she’d been up since before she should have been up.

I didn’t ask about that either.

The city was doing its morning thing outside.

The street sounds in Three Wires at seven are different from Low Halo at seven.

Three Wires is already working.

Low Halo at seven sounds like it is hoping to have been asleep longer.

I sat on the stool and listened to the street and watched Baba work and didn’t say anything.

She didn’t say anything either.

This went on for a while.

— ✦ —

Eventually, she put a plate down in front of me without looking at me.

Two hand pies.

The regular kind. Not the other kind. The ones that are just butter and spiced filling and pastry almost too flaky to hold together, but somehow always does.

I ate one.

She went back to the bread table.

“You came early,” she said.

Which was all she said.

Which was everything.

I didn’t answer, because there wasn’t an answer that wasn’t true, and true was not what I wanted to be at seven in the morning in my socks on the old stool.

I ate the second hand pie.

She did something with the dough for a while.

The city kept doing its thing outside.

The stool was the same stool it always is.

“It was good,” Baba said.

Still not looking at me.

I didn’t ask what was good.

I didn’t have to.

— ✦ —

I left around eight-thirty.

Put my shoes back on. They were mostly dry.

She walked me to the side door like she always does.

Opened it.

Said nothing about that either.

I was already two steps out when she said it.

“Luck favors moving feet.”

I stopped.

Kept my back to her because I had a face on and I wasn’t going to show her the face.

“Yeah,” I said.

“So move,” she said.

I moved.

— ✦ —

The tram was running by then.

I took it back.

It was twenty-three minutes late, because the city believes punctuality is a scam invented by people with chairs.

I sat by the window and watched the city go from Three Wires to Low Halo.

From where I’m from to where I live.

Which is a distance that doesn’t show up on any map but is real anyway.

I had my phone in my pocket.

I didn’t look at the numbers.

I looked out the window.

The city looked the same as it always does. Big and tired and full of itself and somehow still running.

I missed the last rooftop connection by four minutes, so I walked the rest of the way home through the part of morning that belongs to people who are either already done with their night or not yet started on their day.

Nobody asked me anything.

I didn’t explain anything.

It was fine.

The morning was fine.

Everything was fine.

This wasn’t about the song.