April 28, 2020

day 1

The coffee will be weak, remind you of hotel lobbies or airports or funeral receptions.
Your sleep will have been choppy, your feet cold all night under the covers.
There will be more traffic than you anticipated, and someone else’s accident will feel
like a slice of foreboding, and the service station restrooms will reek of the kind of bleach
sprayed to distract from the truth. You’ll have forgotten a jacket, a towel, a bag
of apples, the cocktail shaker you were going to break out at your arrival. 
The sky will be indecisive, un-pin-downable as pastels. And yet this will be the day
you’ve chosen out of the lottery handful, and when later, you are telling the story, 
you will spot the inevitabilities—that lukewarm cup, your stiff feet, the rumpled car 
on the shoulder, everything you forgot to pack except the only thing you needed.