The Last Normal Morning

She measured herself every morning. It had started as a joke, one of those things you do once and then can't stop doing. A pencil mark on the bathroom door, a number in the notes app, a habit that calcified over three months into something she couldn't begin the day without. On Tuesday the tape measure ran out. It was a standard one, the kind that comes in a kitchen junk drawer — ten feet, optimistically labeled. She stood with her back to the wall, the end of the tape at her heel, and stretched it overhead. It reached her collarbone. She stood there for a while looking at it. The coffee was still on. She could smell it from here. The morning was still happening, as mornings do, regardless of what you are doing in your bathroom with a tape measure. She folded it up and put it away. Some information, she had decided, you don't need to have precisely. She got dressed. She drank her coffee standing up — she'd stopped fitting in chairs two weeks ago, a fact she had not told anyone because she wasn't sure what genre of conversation that would start. Her upstairs neighbor knocked on the ceiling. Their floor. "Sorry," she said, and ducked slightly on the way out the front door. It was a normal morning. She had decided this as well. Mostly, she could make it stick.