So there's got to be a reason I woke up at 2:40.
I wasn't woken up, nothing happened, there were no bumps in the night. I simply dreamed myself out of sleep. I think that's probably a good thing, I was dreaming about a night of waiting tables. How in the world that became the late night solace of my psyche, I will never understand, that job is far from a haven.
I'm quite frankly unhappy with the direction this blog post has turned, I was hoping that maybe I would have some profound thought, some intense realization that would change the course of someone's day, anything to make it worthwhile to be up at this hour (now 3:10). Here comes an abrupt change of topic, I'm sorry, but consider yourself warned.
I love late nights. I love when everything else goes so still, but the air is still buzzing with the heat of the day and all the insect songs. Simple sounds, like footsteps on a stone pathway, make echoes you don't hear in the day. I love the shape of nighttime, how shadows don't show what you know to be there, how suddenly perception can't be trusted. I think there's a metaphor hidden in there somewhere.
Maybe nighttime is more than just a time of day, but entire eras of life. It's that time when you can't see what's around you quite as well as you normally can. It's that time when everything just feels different, you feel like your movements are against the turn of the Earth, like the path you're walking is somehow newer and different, though you've been here time and time again. It's that time when you feel a little scared of what you don't see. It's when you lose sight of what you've been so sure of before, and that scares the Dickens out of you because anything could be waiting for you around the corner. The thing is, if something was waiting around the corner, you wouldn't be able to see it in the light either. That's the point of being around the corner, it sneaks up on you just the same.
Nighttime is exciting, you don't have to look around, you aren't missing anything if you're not looking everywhere at once, you can look dead ahead and see almost everything. You can look up at night and feel incredibly small, but part of something much bigger, like a tiny tile in a massive mosaic. Because everything happens for a reason, like waking up before 3 am, because now I feel calm about the changes coming my way, because it's just a little bit of nighttime. And my world is just in a state of calm around me now, and I just hear my footsteps a little better now. They've always echoed this way, I've never been able to hear it. And sure, maybe there is something big and scary lurking ahead, but maybe not. Maybe the biggest thing heading my way is a sunrise, but if that waits a little longer I don't mind. It's only 3:30 now, plenty of time to fall back asleep if the sun stays away.
