She hates it. Every morning the small machine screams and my daughter hates it, slaps at it with her whole flat palm, groans into the pillow like the day has personally wronged her. Nine more minutes, she bargains, and buys them, and lies there in the warm dark spending them on nothing. On being annoyed. On dreading.
I would give anything for a morning I did not want.
Look at her: the sheet creased pink across her cheek, one foot already searching the cold floor and flinching back, hair a ruin she will fix in a mirror she does not really see. The radiator ticks. The light comes gray through the blinds and lands in stripes across the blanket, and it is warm there, it is so warm there, and she cannot feel how warm because she has never once been cold the way I am cold.
The clock screams again. She swings up, sits on the edge of the bed with her hands over her face, gathering herself for the enormous labor of an ordinary Tuesday. She thinks it is a burden. This weight of her own body, waiting to be carried out into a day that will mostly bore her.
Oh, little one. Be bored. Be late. Hate the noise and stumble to the kettle and burn your mouth on coffee you are too rushed to taste.
Go.
The floor is cold and your feet are yours and they will warm.