When the Spanish babies cry

I woke up at 8:30 this morning, and the house was quiet, and I played five games of Solitaire. I looked for my journal, scribbled down a dream I was, at that very moment, forgetting, and marked a date a week from the end of the month with sparkly hearts and jumping stars and what seems to be the disembodied head of a baby panda. I read a poem by John Brehm, titled “The Poems I Have Not Written,” and thought about the stories that were waiting for me in that land of unclaimed stories, where a lizard scuttling on the wall across your bedroom door might mean that in three fast blinks of your left eye, the wind will part, rivulets of air and dust conspiring with you to hasten the steps of the person – other side of the world? a city away? down the road? – you are meant to be with. I thought about a friend in Paris, in a room brimming with Van Goghs, Vermeers, and Klimts, thought about the men that must have slept with her name on their lips, after an hour of conversation and baguettes and cheese. I thought about the young boys two blocks over who ride their bikes at midnight to meet the yayas of the children. I thought about how it would be hot soon. I thought about tonight, about how I’d spend the evening drinking with my mother and an aunt, in some not-so-polite pre-Mother’s Day celebrations. I thought about tomorrow morning, about whether I’ll be awake when the cake that greets the four mothers in this house would arrive. I thought about a day I would not have to wait for for too long, and thought about the dress I may or may not wear with shoes, or maybe slippers? I thought about the ceiling I’ve missed waking up to, the sunlight that streamed through the gray glass of picture windows. I thought about the song that would play in the background as I’d ride trains and field the screams of grinning children I do not know, about the silence of the dead tomatoes when a door finally opens and I finally get a hug from someone who’s not half the length of my body.

At 8:32, the babies from the room above mine cried their way into the morning, and I turned on the bed, and went back to sleep.