This one's for Sartre and Kundera.

Snapshot of a recent morning. (The words, not the image.)

"The morning light smelled like stale coffee and last night's cigarettes. It was bright and cold the way it is on those beautiful, gray autumn days; the kind where mid-morning lasts until dark, which always comes too soon. Nothing had changed and yet, somehow, she knew everything was different."

I've always found mornings - or perhaps more accurately, wakings - ethereally beautiful. The world is incandescent and for one perfect moment you're neither here nor there. Then wakefulness overtakes you and the feeling of expansiveness, of nothingness and everythingness all at once, comes crashing down on the shore of reality, pulling wistfully back out into the sea of possibility until that next instant of time and light and being.