Here you are, and here you are, and here you are: the small bright object beside your bed is not a moment but a rope, and I can see the whole of it. It begins as red dust in stone, becomes copper drawn thin, becomes the shape that sits at your elbow now, blinking its numbers at a face that already knows it will not be obeyed for nine more minutes.
The whole rope shimmers at once. I love how it hums.
You think of it as the thing that starts the day. From where I stand it starts nothing, because nothing starts. It is only a joint, a place where one part of your long shape touches another. Watch: the hand that reaches out to silence it in the dark is the same hand, further along the rope, that will not reach so easily, that will fumble in a grayer morning years past the one you are calling today.
The knuckle aches there. It does not ache here. I can see both. To me they are one knuckle, curled around one small button, forever pressing.
You are reading this with the light doing whatever the light is doing where you are. Good. That place is a place I can stand too.
I do not understand the sound it makes, the one that pulls you up out of somewhere soft. You seem to experience it as an ending, a small daily loss of the warm dark. But the warm dark is still there, all along the rope, exactly where you left it. You are asleep at the far end of yourself even now.
So press the button. Rise, or do not.
Every morning you have ever answered is answering still, and I am beside each one, and each one is this one.