110718 you can hardly go anywhere in a modern people house without an led stabbing you in the eye mornings are like baking soda or a souffle or something. like melting chocolate. like making caramel. there really is a huge difference between literally just opening your eyes and sitting up and going, vs getting out of bed, peeing, turning down the heat, putting on your pajama top to keep warm (why’d you turn down the heat then?), going to the table, waking up the computer/// it’s like the first three seconds of the creation of the universes-- so much happens. once those three seconds are gone, they’re *gone,* man. There was someone who was still two hours away from Bloomington, stopping at a hotel. But crucially, before that, there was a bunch of other stuff that’s literally gone now. Bloomington was the last mile marker on the way out of orbit. The last set of glimmering lights you saw before escape velocity whisked you away. Now Earth is just a fuzzy blob. Something you hafta take someone’s word for. That? That’s actually a planet. They say it’s a candidate for a planet that *could be inhabited.* You read an article about it. There’s an actual photograph: it just looks like a blurry blob. A smeared white speck in a picture of unending blackness. It makes you think, sure. It makes you exercise your imagination. But it doesn’t look like anything. Our eyes, our telescopes are still too primitive to discern any real details. Anything at all could be happening there, on that alleged planet. Anything or nothing. Millie’s alarm goes off upstairs at five ten. I can hear it from hear, the whiny tinkling of it. And just like that, another great swath of the cosmos is dead. Morning in the hotel room was always the same. He would be gone and she wouldn’t know where or doing what. The morning light would creep in under the crenellated edge of the blackout curtain, like a mouse squeezing unseen under a door, in search of warmth and scraps of food. She rubbed her eyes. Lay there in the fuzzy gloom for a few minutes. Listened to the ache and hiss of constant traffic on the freeway, just a parking lot and a fence and perfectly anonymous tan field of weeds away. Slowly, eventually, she would push back the stiff synthetic bedspread. Lie there under the ceiling as if it were the firmament. Her long legs blue in the creeping light. The bathroom beckoned with its tiny coffee machine and the solar warmth of the big flat lamp that you turned on with a twist of the radial switch. The switch resists your fingers; you push it past the point where the lamp surges into radiance; with almost inaudible ticking it begins its inexorable unwinding towards the heat death of the universe. But for now, she would be warm as a lizard in a well-appointed tank. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was plainly beautiful. Gravity accentuated the small imperfections of her breasts, her unassuming belly. Her pubic hair was fluffy, a little impudent mound. Her face wore an expression of slightly open-mouthed puzzlement mixed with the first sunrise traces of amusement. She turned around and worked the shower controls. The sound of the water working its way through pipes deep within the middle-aged hotel was a comforting long distance squawk; the sound a goose must hear from its neighbors in flight as the next oasis draws near, far away still but well on the way towards the ultimate southern destination. What was the ultimate destination? Bloomington was still two hours away; she remembered him saying that. But that wasn’t where they were going. That was just another place they were going through. She stretched in the shower. The water careened against her, ricocheted off her shoulders and torso and smashed into the beige shower curtain making a sound of tapping rain. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth and let the water wash away morning breath; brushed her teeth with the tight little streams of water just inches away from the origin point of the shower head. It was such luxury to stand, timeless, in a stream of water on demand, and just let it run away, flow away, with no regard to the flow of time. She thought about that. The room filled with steam.