My morning walk

“Watch, now, how I start the day…”
- Mary Oliver

It’s early in the morning and I wake, there’s a bird rummaging in the ash outside our house. I hear crows chatting. F. is fast asleep. Just like that, lying there, some sunlight already streaming through, I recall an instagram reel quoting Mary Oliver’s routine of getting up early and going for a walk straight away. Yes. It’s a Sunday. Perfect. Let’s pretend I’m a writer. Yesterday’s clothes dead by the bed. I pull on the blue corduroys and find some socks. A sweater. Milka our cat’s excited. By the door. She runs in and jumps onto the bed. F. wakes briefly, asks when I’ll come back to bed.

I’m going to write, I say.

Write what?

Go back to sleep, I say.

I make coffee while preparing Milka’s wet food. I clean her litterbox. Fill a travel cup with the coffee. Drink two glasses of water. Then I’m off. No jacket. Bucket hat.

Pink clouds. Silence. A few birds. Some cars. I see myself in the windows. I look like I’m coming down from a bender. But slightly more confident. Fresh air. Beautiful. The morning is sharp and blue, but cooler in September now. The perfect calm before autumn.

Something stirs within me. Yesterday’s hotpot. Yesterday’s hot. Pot. It comes to me suddenly. While I arrogantly sip my coffee. And keep sipping. My bowels lament. How far am I from home?

Two km.

Shit.

Walking. Morning. Coffee. Hotpot. The eternal golden braid.

An oven is turned on in the belly. Two km. Perhaps 1.9 now. I’m already circling back but every step is another rock loosening an avalanche. Okay. Stay positive. You’ve run this route tons of times. Never like this. But still:

You will not shit your pants today.

You’re too old.

Morning affirmations: you got this. Stay positive. Mind over body.

Gas escapes. The dam is sealed. Alarms sound.

I’ve got the junkie’s gait now. The way my mother, a trained nurse, describes it as religious, exhausted determination. Much like a speed walker. Speed walkers, by the way, are no strangers to deliberate mid-race defecation.

Two more corners. I’ll turn in here. Although I’ve never turned in there before.

The Tokyo metro system was designed by physarum polycephalum, a brainless slime mold that would travel the most efficient route through the city. Following strategically placed food scraps on a map. I propose that a person in need of a toilet possesses the same capacity for efficient travel as this brainless slime.

There’s another path to my backyard gate I never took before. I’m seeing the world. My nethercheeks are warming. The heat spreads. Lava.

I might be too late. Key. Back door. Open. Milka looks up from the couch, drowsy from breakfast. The notebook falls out of my hands to the floor. I loosen my pants on the way to the downstairs toilet. Thank god, by the way, for downstairs toilets. When the love of your life is sleeping peacefully upstairs it is nothing short of a divine gift to be able to have an entire floor between your orchestra and her dreams. She will not hear a thing.

Before I even touch the seat. Just before. A flamethrower into the bunkers at Omaha Beach.

One fell swoop.

I love you Mary Oliver. But you never warned me about the poop.

And I later find this routine back nowhere. The whole post was a lie. Yes, she took morning walks. But nothing like this.

Or perhaps this is the trouble with poetry.