I turn the kettle off partway through boiling, so that it gets hot enough to whimper but not enough to scream. I pull back the spout cover, silencing the whimper as I pour the water into a mix of instant coffee and a tea bag in a mug, one I received for free from a local florist after congratulating her for 80 years in business and buying a small bouquet to lift my spirits a few months back. Or was it a year? Steam rises from the mug and I inhale the warm scent that reminds me of a Christmas in a snow I've never experienced. I shuffle sleepily toward my apartment balcony, sliding in three steps the blinds, glass, and screen which I had closed the night before in irrational fear. I unfold a chair and sigh as I slump into the forgiving fabric of the seat. I take a sip from my mug and place it on a yellow patio table, rearranging a basil plant and some candles to make room for all four objects. Looking up, I'm surrounded by roughly a dozen plants of various genus that I've managed to somehow encourage through the Summer's heat. The rushing and trickling of a mechanically pumped stream murmurs below me, and the cool breeze of late Summer's dawn gently swirls through my balcony, sweeping some stray hairs from my face and brushing a long palm leaf across my knee. It's peaceful—a welcomed divergence from the slowly increasing caffeine-induced anxiety in my heart. I plan and schedule things I'll complete or attend in the coming coupled weeks, while silencing a reminder of a task I was supposed to have completed an hour ago. A neighbor is trimming their nails on the patio below me and each shrill metallic clip is punctuating the partially-fabricated tranquility of my morning. Ten counts and then the sound of the artificial stream returns to dominate. Onto my second cup of coffeed tea and I start to feel dizzy. I convince myself that I will now be able to accomplish all of my plans for today, but only after a few last remaining moments in morning. I realize in fourteen days I won't be in this space—after twenty-four months of push and pull and uncertainty and comfort and dissatisfaction. Everything has changed between that beginning and this impending end. There is silence between some and distrust around others, and a wondering of whether these two years here have felt more like pause than progress. I tilt my head and try to remember all of the people that came here, until a new, warmer breeze sweeps past me and I drop my eyelids to consider all of the people who never did. I finish the cold contents of my cup and sigh again, heavier now, as I drop my feet to the painted wood floor the sunlight has started to grace. I pull a dead leaf off the basil plant and toss it to flutter into the stream below, before turning against a soft wind that nudges me inside.
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