thinking about average

Today I felt average and old.

Not old in the sense that I was aging faster than normal, but in a context to which my habits and routines felt antiquated and out dated.

I woke up wrapped in the encompassing arms of my boyfriend, warmed by his breathing, and comfortably safe. I was invisible to the outside and for a few seconds, that is all that I wanted. Then the buzzing came. First low and far away, like a siren of a far away street. Then the sound grew and pierced my quiet bubble. Stirring, my boyfriend turned his head to the noise, and cursed aloud at the flashing red and blue lights that constitutes my alarm. I put out my arm to hit it, smack it, make it cease, yet I was a few inches away. I resigned to the fact that unless I got out of bed, I would never turn it off.

Once out of bed, out of the warm and safe embrace of my boyfriend, I put on slippers, a robe, and shuffled across my room to turn off the horrible machine. Once off, my senses seemed to overcompensate for a flash of a second and all the world was a thunder of silence. My eyes squinted at the bright light that seemed to find the smallest crack to break the darkness of my room. My nose smelled the air, and realized that I was at least coherent enough last night to turn on the coffee pot.

Turning around, I realized that my boyfriend was no longer in my bed, and that I was alone in my room. Quickly shedding my robe and slippers, I put on clothes, and went into the kitchen to pour two Irish coffees which I knew I would need to get me through the rest of my day.

This whole morning, from every waking moment of it, could have been experienced by any woman with a boyfriend from the last 15 years, and I could have been approxamately 50 years older and had the same morning as well. In retrospect, I think that every routine is a bunch of your averages. It is an average morning, so you do your average thing, and hope for an average reaction to these things, noting that maybe something horrible/ excellent will happen, but keeping that note to yourself and not adjusting your routine to make room for either extreme.