The alarm mooed Lorelai out of bed, groaning she rolled over and smacked the cow's ass to shut it off. This morning, like any other morning came way to close to the time Lorelai finally went to bed following the Osbornes marathon that she'd gotten hooked on while waiting up for Rory.
It seemed she was doing more and more of that lately, it was a little daunting when you reached that age where the torch was passed from mother to daughter. Lorelai seemed to do everything faster than normal people do, first she had a baby years before she should have and consequently she was facing the prospect of being finished earlier.
Rory was becoming the young woman Lorelai had raised her to be and with college, fast approaching Lorelai was learning that letting go of a child was never easy, no matter how old you were.
Lorelai was still struggling to face the facts that soon Rory would move out and she would be alone. Being one to overdramatize, Lorelai's mind immediately jumped to thoughts of being an old maid and realistically she wasn't really facing any romantic prospects. Things with Alex had fizzled out before things got serious and Lorelai just wasn't up to facing the single scene anymore. That left her here, climbing out of a queen sized bed, shuffling to the shower, turning the radio on as she goes and singing aloud as she prepares for the day.
As mother and daughter go through their familiar routines and rush to Luke's for coffee and breakfast before work and school respectively, Lorelai pauses to think about just how many more times they will be doing this.
Trying not to be maudlin, she doesn't voice these worries to Rory. She feels a combination of sad and proud at the same time, she's anxious to watch Rory grow to her full potential but sad that this period of her life is over.
The bell announcing their arrival rings as they push the door to Luke's open and take a spot by the window. Lorelai has been thinking about these daily routines, not merely because soon she'll be doing them alone, but because of the comfort she takes in them and why.
Lorelai has never been a creature of habit yet day after day she finds herself performing these tasks habitually. She wasn't sure when it started, when she was younger she longed for a life where she could just do whatever she wanted whenever she felt like doing it. Having Rory didn't cause this either; it seemed to just have started over time.
She moved to this town and grew increasingly accustomed to fulfilling these daily tasks; lately she had even begun to get excited for them. In her head at work she would plot out things to say when she made her afternoon coffee stop by Luke's and sometimes find herself predicting his response. She was usually right, over the years of getting to know each other they had developed a sort of repertoire that allowed them to predict each others responses, atleast she could his. She wasn't sure if Luke sat around thinking of things she might say to him, so he could come up with answers.
Her predictions had been a little off lately; she hadn't really been able to attribute it to anything in particular. She chalked it up to the stress of knowing Rory is leaving soon, but sometimes in the back of her head, she blamed it on Nicole, Luke's girlfriend. Ever since he had started dating her, the relationship between he and Lorelai had been a little off.
The relationship had never been anything more than platonic, it kind of bothered Lorelai that the dynamic had been thrown off when he got a girlfriend, what did that say about her and Luke? When Sookie and Jackson started dating it didn't really change Lorelai and Sookie's friendship, there may have been a little less time for them to hang out together, but the relationship remained intact.
Lorelai had always counted on her relationship with Luke being the same, now it suddenly wasn't, and it really bothered her.