And the beat changes, goes on...

For the moments leading up to this one, I blame you.

For this moment, I blame me.

It's a beautiful morning. Well, it would be, if it were November. As it is May, I'm going to call it pretty...

The sun is rising in all those hazy colors over a lake covered in fog and it is so damned cliche, so fucking romantic I could claw out my own eyes for having witnessed such a spectacular tragedy. The morning that follows this ridiculous parody of a Shakespearean sunrise can shove it. And the day that grows from this morning, well, might as well never happen.

I didn't plan on ending up here. I never do with you. But I had something to say and you needed to hear it... It wasn't going to be nice, but I'd had just enough Jameson and just about enough of this soap opera you and I call a friendship to be a little mean.

The drive to your house seems scant seconds, not nearly long enough to calm myself, so when I pull into your driveway, I am seething. I am ready to yell and rant and rage until you and I have made sense of all of this. I am going to pace and smoke and-

Do...nothing...at all. You aren't home. Where the hell are you? I need to get rid of this ridiculousness in my brain...somehow. Like I said, for this moment, I blame you.

I decide to drive. An early morning trip up the shore seems like a good idea. There's a backup pack of cigarettes in the glovebox and I can turn on some Jason Mraz and- Fuck. Not Jason Mraz, does he have to make me think about you? I hate that we have the same taste in music. And now that I think about it, Gavin DeGraw, John Mayer, Johnny Cash, The White Stripes, and Matchbox 20 are all out of the question... Damn.

As I search through the cd's I haven't discarded, I catch a glimpse of my gas gauge. The orange needle is mocking me, dancing perilously close to 'E.' With gas prices as they are, a drive is the wrong idea, but it would seem I have nowhere to go. Even my precious Caribou Coffee still sleeps, oblivious that it is abandoning me in my hour of need. Oh well, I guess I'll always have you, pack of Camel Lights.

I pull a cigarette from its box, and I manage a sort of bittersweet smile as I savor that first inhale. I watch the smoke curl and writhe around the inside of the car and it is just as trapped as I am, the lost wanderer of the air on a too-cold morning in May, grasping for a place to be and finding no such hold. It is as if nothing-

Fuck this. I cannot sit in your driveway waxing poetic about cigarette smoke all damn day. I have to get out of here.

Where to? Where to chain smoke with a pen in one hand and coffee in the other?

Where does a heartsick pile of twenty-something woman go to escape the sunrise and its relentless consequences?

To keep you in my life, will I always run from the mornings?