I woke when it was still morning and I had a congested nose and a pressure behind my forehead and eyes. If it weren’t for fidgeting from the discomfort, I would’ve stayed put and read or slept. Instead, I rose and navigated the steep stairs to the bathroom to up-end my head and inject the magic spray into each nostril, near straight into the blood, and then I poured a bowl of cereal with soy milk and brought it up to the chair in front of the window and ate the bland goodness, its texture warring with the bitter drip of the medicine, and watched the morning surfers surf in the cold hard gray the day turned out to be. When I finished the cereal, I left the bowl by the chair and went back to bed. It was one when I woke again, and it was a hard waking from a deep sleep I couldn’t have thought possible given the amount of sleeping I’ve been doing. It may be a cold, it may be allergies, or perhaps the progesterone fever has broken and now my body descends.

I got up and put in my contact lenses and brushed my teeth and set the water to cook for mat’cha. Then I put the おもがし on a plate and took two more from the freezer to thaw on the counter and four more from the freezer to thaw in the refrigerator. I ate the sweet and drank the tea and was still hungry so I made another bowl of cereal and then got in the shower to wash off the remaining sleep. After, I turned on the radio, already tuned to CBC, and stretched while I waited for the weather report. Sixty-percent chance of drizzle on the west coast. I made sencha and poured sembei into a bowl and read poetry and wrote in my journal for a while.

My aspiration for the day was to walk to the Tofitian for coffee and to the Beaches grocery for more chocolate. But a misty fog hugged the distant bluff and rain seemed imminent. I waited. Drizzle started and stopped but that didn’t advance the cloud cover. Finally, I decided just to go and strode out to Chesterman Drive with Dougalanta loud in my ears and my AG bag slung around my chest and walked a half an hour to the café in the unexpectedly warm and humid day.

I ordered a double soy mocha from the woman and told her it was for here, if that made a difference─if that meant she’d serve it in a porcelain cup. And she said that it did make a difference and asked if I wanted whipped cream, which I did. She added that she closed in 15 minutes and asked whether that made a difference for whether I wanted it for here. She looked up at the clock and I turned full to follow her gaze. I said it didn’t matter because I would drink it quickly. I wanted a Tofitian sticker to brand my bike because I always go there when I come here, but she said she was out. She said she might have more tomorrow. I took the hot drink out onto the porch and sat next to a family from the city who seemed to have just arrived in town and were waiting to check in somewhere. Their boy said, Can’t we go to our rooms now? And the mother said they had to wait. The boy wanted to go in the pool and in response to his mother’s explanation constructed an elaborate fantasy of deception and lockpicking in order that they could go into the pool sooner.

I drank half my drink and felt ill. Maybe from a cold or maybe because I haven’t had coffee since that last push-the button-yourself Starbucks-brand Americano on the ferry three days ago. I went back into the café and said I’d need that to-go cup anyway to take the rest home. The barista worried that she had chased me away and I reassured her. She poured the drink into a 12 oz paper cup and the remainder of my drink filled it not even halfway. I didn’t take a lid. I inquired about a restroom and she said there was one in the surf shop across the street, the street being the dirt expanse where buildings weren’t. I walked across the lot skirting puddles and slow-moving cars to the surf shop, the inside of which was a feast of color and sport fantasy and yuppie-mall retail that I couldn’t have anticipated from outside. I knew at that moment that surfing out here is a cash-cow business, more than I imagined, and it explained, at least in part, the local welcoming of gentrification. Inside the bathroom, adolescent girls advertising billabong bikinis from posters pinned to the wall stared at me while I peed. They had a Japanese toilet in there, with a little and a big flush but not the robot control, and the sink was a shallow bowl of glass of huge diameter on top of which another shallower and smaller bowl sat. And from that smaller bowl protruded a small wand that stuck straight up. I discovered that if you tip the wand, water flows from the smaller bowl into the large one and that makes the sink go. Fancy. I tried the air dryer but it didn’t respond to my flamboyant hand waving so I left with my hands wet and one hand gripping the half mocha in its cup with no lid.

The grocery didn’t have chocolate syrup only chocolate kahlua sauce so I got a Ritter Sport and called it good. When I left the store it was drizzling and I started off down the narrow paved bike and foot trail minding the slugs and the sunderings from roots and sinkings. I had the same song going. The drizzle turned to rain and the wind kicked in for good measure. I pulled up the hood on my hoodie but a gust eventually kicked it off. Water began to accumulate at the tips of the leaves overhead and it fell in big drops on me and into the coffee with humorous plunks.

At the cabin now, my one long-sleeved thing hanging to dry next to the heater in the bathroom. The rain dwindled to a drizzle but the drizzle has not waned. A few surfers and people clad in plastic; otherwise the beach is bare and the forest silent. Darkness comes.