The lake is still when I wake up.
I lie there for a moment and look at the ceiling and understand that something changed last night in a sitting room with a low lamp and a dark window, and I am not afraid of it the way I expected it to be. I expected to wake up afraid. I expected the particular cold clarity of morning to make last night look like a mistake.
It doesn't.
It just looks like the truth.
I get up. I dress quietly, and I take my notebook, and I go downstairs before anyone else moves. The house is completely still, the kind of still that belongs to old buildings that have absorbed a hundred quiet mornings and know what to do with one more.
I find the kitchen. I make coffee. I take it outside.
The lawn runs down to the water in the early light, and the lake is gray and silver
