Indulgence

What is indulgence?  To everyone, I suppose, it's different.  To me, today, it's sleeping until ten.  Ten! More than four hours later than my weekly wake time.

It's also this -- going back to bed, with coffee and steamed almond milk (Oh, what. Those of you my age can still process eight fluid ounces of cow's milk without consequence?  Please.) and read.  Read until I finish the book.  Read and laugh and get toast crumbs on my collar bone and not care.  Leave them sitting, itching, there until I brush them off the next time I get up.  Maybe I'd make a good invalid?  Maybe I was born to be here, this plane of horizontal existence, letting my muscles atrophy while spoon-feeding my mind with words and images, birds in the trees outside insistently emphasizing something, some point I will never understand, small engine aircraft droning miserably in the distance, its pilot never knowing how lonely that sound makes me feel.

The cats, well, the cats are all for it.  This is their life except for the reading.  They sleep and shift, stretch and curl their heads upside down.  Despite their comparatively short lifespans, I'm jealous of their lifestyle.  Eighteen sweet, sweet hours of sleep.  The rest is just filler.  Biological needs that keep them going, dozing through a beautiful Spring day.

But alas, I am human.  I feel the pull of substantial hunger, a jealousy of the cafe goers across the street, laughing and enjoying other people who are all, despite the sixty-eight degree weather, wearing scarves.  I'm one of them, sans scarf, and will have to get  up and join them eventually.