Simplicity. And Morning Light.

I fall in love with things in the morning. 
Which is funny, because by all means I would never describe myself as a morning person. I do not rise early. I do not look forward to jumping out of bed. I am someone who loathes the torturous process of waking up. 
And yet, I fall in love in the morning. 
This is what I realized this morning, while thinking about that morning. 
I think it's the morning light. That evasive, elusive, poetic thing. In that raw morning light, where there is just... being. The day has yet to start, words have yet to be spoken. No one is reading into anything or analyzing. People are just being. Breathing. Resting. There is raw hope and honesty and promise in these morning rays, and I think that is why it reaches into my very heart and makes me fall in love. 
.... I am a lover of the simple things. The simple moments. I don't fall in love with grand gestures. I fall in love with seemingly unimportant moments that pass in the blink of an eye. It happened twice this weekend.  I fell in love in the raw morning light, in the way you kissed the back of my neck while I stood methodically pressing the espresso machine buttons for your cup of coffee. The fullness of affection was overwhelming to me. If you had asked, I would have handed you my heart right then and there  with your morning coffee like a scone on a paper napkin. I froze, and I think it might have scared you. But I froze, foolishly thinking if my body froze the moment could freeze too.  I fell in love on itchy carpet, a half child - half spider crawling on top of me, torturing me with tickles and child threats of eating my face off. Her hand was crawling across the carpet and suddenly it was like I had never seen it before -- those itty-bitty fingers, those itty-bitty nails! They were so thin in that light, they could have been translucent. I caught her hand crawling across the carpet. "Mari, your hand is so tiny!" She stared at me like I was crazy, her full-grown eyes bugging out of her tiny child head. "You've seen them before!" she squealed before running off to attack my feet.  I fell in love in the hazy light of midnight lamps against ink black skies, as she weaved her thin little arm like needle and thread behind my head and asked me half-whisper if I could stay just a little longer. In the way she pulled my head closer when it wasn't close enough, and methodically fed me pretzel rods so that I wouldn't move from my position.  .... All of my friends are having goodbye parties lately, it seems.  Their hearts fall out of their sockets for the call of a new adventure, new city, new land, new taste, new experience. They crave change. They crave being wild and free. They go weak in the knees for a new view.  My heart falls out of my socket for morning coffee in morning light, and spider arms feeding me pretzel rods in front of the glowing screen of Octonauts. I crave simplicity. I crave a monotonous routine of incomprehensible beauty. I go weak in the knees for coffee cups and spider arms.  My friends laugh at me now, at the easy way I've tapped out of the bar scene and crowded, rowdy nights of too many people at one table with sticky cups and cans. They laugh at me, knowing that I crave these simple things that make me sound more like a 40 year old, and less like a 24 year old. They ask me how I can survive so many dating disasters, how I can keep going and going. 

It is the magic of the morning light, of the simple gesture of a coffee cup, and the light brush of spider arms. It is this, that keeps me going. 

Because this. Because at the end of this all, is waking up to the same person every morning for the rest of my life and falling in love all over again in the morning light. It is coffee cups and spider arms and simplicity and routine and love. 
.....