Coffee and Cigarettes

So it is 4:30 in the morning and I just fluffed my hair.

I just woke up. I woke up to sit in my dark house, alone, in front of the computer, listening to a miscellaneous professor at a miscellaneous university talk at length about some miscellaneous detail in my miscellaneous degree.

But none of that matters.

What matters is that as soon as I woke up, I walked to the kitchen to make coffee and looked out my curtainless window across the dark plains to see a lone orange cinder and a shadow, burning like a firefly just outside my window.

That was when I fluffed my hair.

I have written a few times about the fact that the university has provided each of the professors with 24 hour security service. Let me elaborate. We have a boy (hopefully, at least 18 years old) who sits outside of our house from 7am to 7 pm. Come 7pm his (only slightly) older brother (or perhaps, cousin?) shows up for the 7pm-7am shift. It is this slightly older boy who smokes. And it was his lit cigarette that greeted me so early this morning.

Oh, Man. Someone. Is. Out. There.

Okay, get it together. Fluff hair, scrub drool from cheek, pull pajama pant leg down. Shake it off.

...I am not fooling anyone.

I stumble in the middle of the night looking for the filter coffee and look like a first year acting student trying to pantomime "making coffee" for her class. Suddenly I am overwhelmed by self-consciousness.

Take the coffee out of the cabinet. Put it on the counter.

Take the milk from the fridge. Put it on the counter.

Find a spoon. Where is the spoon. What is a good, "I can't find a clean spoon face?" Better, make the "Aha, here is a clean spoon" face instead.

Oh no, spilled some coffee on the counter. "Look" around. Find a dish rag. Gently shovel the spilled coffee into the sink.

Honestly, the thought crosses my mind, Make it more believable. I try harder. Making coffee, making coffee, what is it the humans do? How would a human wait for it to brew? And for the first time in about fifteen years, I twirl a lock of hair. "Waiting."

The little orange cinder moves away.

I realize that he has gone behind the security shed to pee. All it takes to turn yourself into an object is to cast a shadow, to be visible.

Maybe he is "peeing" instead. His shadow is definitely up to something.

Maybe we are doing a self-conscious dance where we exchange quotation marks, lurking from behind them, longing for privacy, for security, for comfort in our own skin. So, instead of these things we get windows, but no curtains; shadows, instead of men (or women), and quotation marks instead of... well, instead of coffee.