The First Morning After

There is a very particular kind of morning that comes after something changes.

Not the morning after in the way you're probably thinking.

Behave.

I mean the morning after you meet someone and suddenly realize that whatever existed between you yesterday doesn't feel quite the same today.

I remember mine.

I was getting ready for work, doing all the perfectly ordinary things I did every morning, except my mind had apparently decided it had absolutely no intention of joining me.

It was still somewhere in the night before.

At dinner.

In the laughter.

Walking through the city.

At every single traffic light where, somehow, stopping became an excellent excuse for one more kiss.

And then another.

And probably another.

We were supposed to be going home.

It was getting late.

I knew I had work the next morning.

The responsible thing would have been to say goodnight.

Apparently, responsibility had taken the evening off.

Because suddenly getting home late didn't seem particularly important.

Five more minutes did.

One more street.

One more conversation.

One more red light.

One more kiss.

It's funny because I remember trying to maintain some kind of composure.

Trying to behave as though this was all perfectly normal and I was completely unaffected by it.

My body, unfortunately, was not interested in cooperating.

It kept moving a little closer to him.

Almost without permission.

Like a magnet.

I've wondered since whether that's what people mean when they talk about butterflies.

I'm still not entirely convinced.

Butterflies sounds far too delicate for whatever was happening inside me that night.

And perhaps that's one of the frustrating things about feelings.

We like naming them.

Attraction.

Excitement.

Love.

Nerves.

Butterflies.

We put words around emotions because words make things easier to understand.

If you can name something, perhaps you can make sense of it.

But every now and then, you feel something that refuses to fit neatly inside any of them.

That's what happened to me.

Even now, I couldn't tell you exactly what it was.

I only know that I didn't want the night to end.

Eventually, of course, it did.

And the next morning, life had the audacity to continue normally.

I had to go to work.

There were trains to catch, emails waiting, things to do.

Except I was standing there getting ready with one completely ridiculous problem.

I couldn't stop smiling.

Not a sophisticated little smile either.

A silly one.

The kind you try to get rid of when you're surrounded by strangers because you're fairly certain you look slightly unhinged.

I remember sitting on the train and catching myself doing it again.

Stop smiling.

A few seconds later...

Still smiling.

I thought about dinner.

Smile.

The walk.

Smile.

Those traffic lights.

Definitely smile.

And somewhere between one station and the next, I had one very simple thought.

Oh.

That actually happened.

Maybe that's the part of falling for someone we don't talk about enough.

Not the grand realization.

Not the dramatic declaration.

Sometimes it's simply the morning after.

When the world looks exactly the same as it did yesterday, but something inside you doesn't.

You still have to go to work.

You still need coffee.

The train still arrives.

People around you are living completely ordinary mornings.

Nobody knows that the night before, something shifted by a few millimeters in your little universe.

But you know.

And apparently your face knows too.

I don't remember when that smile finally disappeared.

Actually, that's not entirely true.

Because years later, when I think about that night, something rather inconvenient still happens.

Dinner.

The laughter.

Walking through the city.

Stopping at traffic lights because neither of us seemed particularly interested in reaching our destination.

One more kiss.

And there it is again.

That same silly smile.

Still there.

Still intact.

So perhaps I never figured out exactly what I felt that night.

Maybe I don't need to.

Some feelings aren't meant to be neatly labeled, analyzed and placed inside a little box.

Sometimes all you get is the memory of a night you didn't want to end...

and a smile that, somehow, never quite learned how to leave.

And I think I'm okay with that 🤍

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