Morning in a Coffee Cup

Steam rises like ghosts learning to leave— translucent, reluctant, climbing back to sky where they belong.

The light finds the rim first, turns ceramic a threshold: there, the universe shifts from dark to amber. A small cosmos cooling in my hands, unmeasured, unhurried.

You would say I notice too much. Perhaps. But the spoon resting in the saucer— silver eye that blinks when I lift it, holding a reflection I cannot keep.

Everything is leaving. Everything arrives. The coffee darkens to stranger colors, and I become a stranger to this morning that was never mine, is never anyone's, perfect in its indifference.