God’s Plan

 “She said, ‘Do you love me?’ I tell her, ‘Only partly. I only love my bed and my momma, I'm sorry.’” -Drake

This is our morning sound. Our weird, for no good reason, routine. My alarm sounds around 4:00 am and I’m out of bed. Blaine stumbles to the kitchen and I hear the kettle begin to whistle as the water for the coffee starts to boil.  After I finish putting in my contacts, putting on my ridiculously red lipstick, and picking out whatever creative accessory I’ve decided I need for my job that day, I walk over to join him in the kitchen as he hands me a cup of coffee.

“Alexa, play ‘God’s Plan’.”

And we dance. I hold my cup of coffee in hand and dance like a fool in my kitchen, rapping to Drake’s newest song as the rest of the world sleeps under the cover of the morning’s darkness. It’s bizarre, our ritual. It doesn’t connect to much else of who we are, but it’s ours.

The way I take my coffee isn’t simple. It also isn’t flowery. It is, however, cumbersome and complicated. French press coffee + Madagascar vanilla ghee + chopped up vanilla bean + coconut cream + almond milk + a dash of cinnamon if I’m feeling extra fancy. Then, throw all this into the blender and wait for a frothy concoction to form. As my husband so sassily remarked one morning,  “The only people who drink their coffee out of a blender are Mariah Carey.” He’s not wrong. But this is also our ritual. It’s bizarre. It doesn’t connect to much else of who we are, but it’s ours.

These small moments. These small routines. These alarm sounds, the roll out of bed, the blend of the coffee, the doing of the makeup, the ‘Alexa, play Drake’, the dancing like a weirdo before the sun rises. These are ours.

Sometimes it can seem that things are stagnant unless something big and noteworthy is happening. I don’t think I believe that anymore. We have both noteworthy things and mundane things going on all the time, but I think we’re carving out what our life looks like in the small moments like the persistent working of the tides along the coast carving out monuments. Land known by and for generations to come. They may be small moments but my goodness, they’re ours. They’re lovely and filled with rhythm and routine and so  many little rituals. This thing we’re doing is life building. It’s legacy creating. And it blows my mind that we’re actually doing it. We aren’t waiting for some magical day when we wake up and life will start. This is it. These are the days.