Tuesday again

It's ten past three on a Tuesday afternoon, some weeks on. The paragraph in front of you is a bit dull, and there's the beginning of the dip, a slight heaviness that you recognise now and can name. You get up, put the kettle on, make a decaf, and stand at the window for four minutes watching a van try to reverse into a space. You go back and the paragraph is fine. It was the paragraph.

The day started at twenty past six, before the alarm, which still surprises you. You lay for a few minutes and then got up, and the fog wasn't there. You made a coffee at seven, from the good beans, and drank it sitting down, and it was the best thing in the morning rather than the thing that made the morning possible. There was a second one at nine. That's the count for the day, and there's no tea at eleven now, because the tea was a dose, and you didn't miss it.

At half past five you drive home without a cup, and the drive is fine. At half past nine you notice you're drowsy, which used to happen never, and at half past ten you go up. You're asleep in the way that people describe, which is not knowing when it happened.

It wasn't always like this. The first week, moving the cut-off alone, the drive home was flat and you resented it. The second week you halved the morning cups and had two days with a headache and a foul temper, and on the second of them you nearly stopped. The third week the morning score in the notebook went from fives to sevens and stayed there, and that was the week you stopped calling yourself a tired person.

There have been slips. A late espresso at a birthday dinner, and a bad night, and a Wednesday that felt like the old days. A week of a big project when you had a three o'clock coffee every day, on purpose, knowing what it would cost, and then stopped again.

You still drink coffee. You'd say two a day if asked, and it would be true, and you'd know it was two hundred milligrams and that the last one was at nine. You still like it. You like it more, because it's not doing a job any more. It's just coffee, drunk by someone who's awake.

If you've read this far and changed nothing yet, try one thing. This week, keep everything as it is except the last dose. Move it to before two o'clock. Then see what the mornings do.