Not all mornings begin with coffee. There are small breaths. Little gasps of air that escape the body.

The mists of dew rise up along the brick. The outside walls hold together the house built in the 90s. The door’s petite window robs the sun from shining little waves of heat onto the floor of the entryway. There are places to look outside, but no one wants to see.

There’s some white stucco that line up the walls into little patterns. Arms of the grass straighten the uneven sidewalk. The grass stands straight with dead yellow tips, sunburnt from the time spent outside on the ground, collecting heat and moisture.

The dark spots in the grass are multiple rejection letters from the Sun. The sand meets the sidewalk like an uncle at the bar, noisy and lonely, but sturdy. The outside lacks the color of sandstone.

There are only small branches on the bushes surrounding the front porch. The towering spruce tree in the dark days moans for the morning cold breeze. The windows have white trimming surrounding the boundaries, a clear demarcation of the natural versus the man-made.

The inside space is small. The rooms are small. The bedrooms are small. The 2 living rooms take up the entire front section of the house. Each living room has it’s own necessary tools. The TV remote and a battery charger that takes only double A batteries. The batteries have all the commotion of a conceited invention. There are areas with access to sunlight, albeit the rays are blue due to the tarp covering the plexiglass dome on the roof.

But in this house, lives a family, a medium sized family.

Tacoma, Anne, Chad, Chase, Cade and Nana. Three generations of Navajos together again.
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I’m not having a good night. I see the dark outlines of the shadows. The trees hide sun rays. The windows don’t without the rays special dance into the kitchen. They come and leave. Sleeping on the couch in the family room beats sleeping on the floor.

Sleeping on the floor, the roadways, the hallways, do not match the power of “meeting each other where we are at.” But who are we? What about the rays of light that pound into the ground to get the boys to catch up before them major lockdowns.

Dark leads into the shadows of the morning and sunlight loses a few drops of nervous sweat before starting the day. But my family has better ways to being their day.

The morning is special. Having a kid ruins the solace of darkness birthing light. The morning is for taking up space, not receding back into time. The morning is for having a meltdown and waiting for the family to make the hours escape all the freedom of living alone. There are ideas about making it into the night just one more time.

But this is what we do. We sleep and wait. We eat and wait. We cry and wait. We scream and wait. What is else is there to do? We handle the dark hours. We handle all the changes that make us into the people we are required to be: to be another number. To just be a checklist.

That is not all the matters. We can make it through the dark. To see light in our own eyes. No. Lets make it hard to connect with the other people.

But what can we all reckon to compete with the viewpoints of the rest of society? The hurdles of waking up alone cannot compete with new life. With no one to share the pain and sorrows of moving to new places, I stand all amazed.

There are connections needed to get through light’s magical escape. The stopping and going. The connections to others. The feeling of pain and not radiating heat in the moments that mark the time to complete all the yeses and no.

A questionnaire for others to make fun of. I am tired, and I had all the morning to connect with the rest of the family. To not be understood but to get into the mood of having to explain my emotions to them. What gives them the right to think they can have all of my own personal stories?

I can only imagine the pain we inhabit. I am in the world. My family is coming now.