A Morning Ritual

Arise at 6:45. Check email, be seduced by half a dozen emails rising through early morning shadows. The same as every other morning, except for mornings where there’s inexplicably no emails or a paltry number 1 or 2. Don’t open emails until after breakfast, though. And try not to think of their contents. But that’s futile. They creep into your mind with manic precision. Are they lit mag responses? Invitations to parties? You try not to dream too much.

You still store the rejections from writing contests you entered after a couple glasses of nightly Merlot. And you still recall the attempts to start a movie club, deflated like balloons. Old friends and strangers alike said maybe they’d join next week, maybe next month. Maybe, of course, was and still is the most obvious form of ‘no’. Your mother and older sister Nan always promise to visit too, but things keep tripping them up. Teaching duties for Mom, Nan’s duties as a reporter for a venerable paper, covering movies and culture. They proclaim love, but love is a painful thing when spoken from a distance, something that holds the past, holds reminders of being part of a unit. It’s just you now. You, Nicholas Alexander Botkin, are the inhabitant of this apartment. The master of half-empty spaces, rife with chipped oak desks and plastic bowls and cups. Or half-full, the optimists would say. You are a man whose fridge holds eggs, Diet Pepsi, TV dinners, and onions. On top of that, you live in editing gigs and tutoring services. And of course, you have nightly bottles of superfluous, unaffordable Merlot and episodes of ‘Barry’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’. Pour the first of many cups of Diet Pepsi. The day will be long. For breakfast, have your customary eggs with toast dipped in it. There’s something soothing in that act, a tender, confident motion, yellow and brown mingling. A colourful explosion. You always eat at 7:00. At least you have some sense of time. Wash the bowls, trudge back to your whitewalled room. 7:17. The day is long. At least time hasn’t slipped. Open the emails, but not in one burst. Unfurl each like packages that Mom and Nan got you back when adulthood was on the precipice, but still oddly seemed far away. When funny hoodies and gift cards seemed like the sweetest things and when the packaging itself seemed even sweeter, festooned in shades of lavender, navy blue, gold. An acceptance from a lit mag would be good. An indicator that you’re not just reacting to the world, but acting. Putting yourself out there, submitting with fervency, transmitting your opuses (or opera, to use the technically correct plural). Even if stories about runaway parents and drunks in the suburbs are the ultimate cliché, you are fearless. You are the man who submits to