First light at the stall

The stall opens before the town does. By the time the first bus grinds past at ten to six the kettle is already going, and the old man who runs it has set out the same nine stools he has set out for thirty years, in the same slightly wrong arc, because straightening them is not the sort of thing he does.

I come here when I cannot sleep, which is more often than I admit to anyone, and I sit at the end stool with a kopi o and watch the town arrive one person at a time.

First is the woman who cleans the temple. She takes her coffee standing, three mouthfuls, no sugar, no words, and is gone before it has properly cooled. Then two men from the boats, still smelling of the night's work, who argue gently about a football match that finished hours ago in a country neither has been to. The old man does not write their order down. He has not written an order down since the last century.

There is a boy, maybe nine, sent out for kaya toast wrapped in brown paper for a household still asleep. He is proud of the errand and terrified of dropping it, and he holds the warm parcel against his chest with both arms the whole way home, the way you would carry something alive.

I have been coming long enough to know the shape of the morning before it happens, and still I come, because the pleasure is not in the surprise. It is in the reliability. The same kettle, the same wrong arc of stools, the same light coming grey then gold over the wet road, the same old man who has never once asked me why I am there at that hour and never once needed to.

Around half past six the town is properly awake and the stall gets busy and loses its spell, the way a tide comes in and covers the good flat rocks you were sitting on. That is my cue. I pay the same coins I always pay. He nods the same nod. I walk home into a day that has not decided anything about me yet, carrying nothing, having done nothing, feeling for an hour or so as though I have been let in on something the busier hours never get to see.

Nobody in that scene would remember me being there. That is the closest thing I know to peace. To sit at the edge of a morning that does not need you, and to be, for a little while, simply another stool in the wrong arc, warmed by the same kettle as everyone else.