There is a quality to the fourth morning of something that the first three do not have.
By the fourth morning, the place has stopped being new. The body has adjusted to the particular mattress, to the specific sound the sea makes through the walls of this building in this city, to the rhythm of light coming through this window at this hour. The place has become ordinary in the best possible sense — ordinary meaning: incorporated, accepted, no longer requiring the additional processing of the unfamiliar. By the fourth morning, you are simply there, and the there has become a known quantity, and you can be in it without the particular effort of being somewhere new.
I noticed this at seven-fifteen, sitting at the small desk with my second cup of tea.
