# A glimpse of the other side

I like to wake up early to watch the sunrise. The sun hits the distant city first, the little sliver of it I can see through the trees. The buildings light up copper against the pale pink sky, and that little sliver is the only bit of saturation in an otherwise grey visual field. Then the sun starts to rise over the hill behind me. My house casts a blue shadow across the street, and a few trees start to get washed in pale gold. The fog burns away.

I sit at my window for an hour, and I don’t check my phone once. It’s in another room. It doesn’t matter.

I have thoughts, looking down at the people below me. Most of them are fleeting, the kind of thing I think about texting to my boyfriend, but instead I let them pass. If something is worth remembering or exploring, I’ll write it down in a notebook, or on my digital typewriter. Sometimes it’ll become a 1500-word essay, sometimes a poem or a song. Often, the thought just stays there, to be returned to, turned over in my mind until I’ve figured out the larger shape of it.

I make my breakfast, singing to myself. I bike to work with my phone in one of my panniers, out of reach, out of hearing range.

The two-year-old twins I nanny light up when I walk in, and they shout my name in their garbled toddler voices and run over to hug my legs. I crouch down to their level and talk to them, listen to them. The girl twin asks for “buh-ee”, and thanks to months of careful study of her consonant-poor language, I go and get her a blanket. The boy twin points at a picture of the moon and says “mon mon mon mon mon” more and more insistently until I say “That’s right, moon!”, at which point he is satisfied and gets on with his life. He just wants acknowledgement. Don’t we all.

At the park, I talk with other nannies, trading my broken Mandarin and Spanish for their broken English as we laugh and cluck over our many toddlers. I used to be far too afraid to talk to strangers, let alone in a language I wasn’t good at. Now it would feel weird not to.

While the kids nap, I read. I get through many books every month, not because of external pressure to read more, but because I like learning things, and because reading is something you can do even if you’re tired. I always liked reading when I was a kid, but for a few years I forgot to do it. (Sometimes the book is boring and I fall asleep, and that’s okay too.)

On my way home, I stop at the grocery store. While I wait in line to check out, I watch the people around me and think about nothing in particular. My mind is calm; the interstitial time doesn’t feel like suffering, like it once did. I don’t feel the need to be distracted.

At home, I open my laptop to respond to a time-sensitive email, and then half an hour later I realize I’m just on Wikipedia. Oops. I close my laptop and leave it behind.

When my boyfriend comes home, he picks up a guitar and noodles on it while we talk about our days. We laugh a lot. He’s gotten a lot better at the guitar in the past two years, deliberate practice on the pentatonic scales so he can pick out melodies. Sometimes we’ll play a song together, or I’ll inexpertly play piano while he reads. Most nights, we watch one episode of the one show we’re watching. The last three shows have been in Chinese, since he decided to learn it, and we pause a lot to puzzle through the sentences together.

We turn off our screens at 9 PM, even if the episode isn’t over. We brush our teeth and write in our journals and read books next to each other in bed, and we go to sleep so we can do it all again the next day. This is the life we’ve chosen, and we like it.