amidthestars | What's the Story

For a few years, I woke up well before the sunrise. Most days, by the time the sun heaved itself over the New England hills, I had been awake long enough to have earned myself a nap. Now, crawling out of bed to a world already full of light makes me feel like I've wasted precious time.

I never used to be a morning person. I grew up in a house with basically no rules. (For the most part, I was such an anxious and conscientious child that rules were never really necessary.) I was always in charge of putting myself to bed, which I did, usually very late, after finishing one novel and starting another and reluctantly giving up on the struggle to keep my book from hitting me in the face as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

I loved to be the only person awake. I waited for it, in my basement bedroom: the upstairs footsteps gradually lessening, and then stopping all together. The creaks in the walls as the house itself settled in for sleep. I felt at home in those dark hours. Returned to myself, to the self I knew best. And to a world that, for a few merciful hours, was dark and quiet and vast in a way what wasn't just comforting or familiar, but that somehow recognized me in a way I never felt in daylight.

Staying up late, of course, meant that I struggled to wake up early. I was the kid who slept until noon whenever I could manage it. I earned a reputation among my friends' stay-at-home helicopter moms for being kind of lazy and undisciplined ant strange (which was not really true, except for the strange part).

I kept some variation of these habits until grad school, a million years later. I was writing a thesis, which I found wildly overwhelming, and at some point I decided that it might be easier if I did all my writing as early in the day as possible. If I could write, say, from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., I'd have faced the hardest part of my day before the sunrise, and would hopefully have done enough work to justifiably spend the rest of the day panicking and crying and pacing without the guilt of not having accomplished anything of value.

It proved a pretty successful approach. My mind was clearer in those hours, the world quieter, my utterly fear-filled heart a little less aggressive. I did good work. (I also cried a lot, but what can you do.) After the thesis was finished, I continued to get up early, first just because I liked it and later because my life demanded it. Sometimes, I read. Most often, I prayed. I loved, and still love, the space between waking and living - the moments where I can just breathe into the fact of being alive without any of its demands.

These days I still get up hours before I need to, though usually not before the sunrise. I read, most of the time. I wish I could pray, but I can't, at least not in the ways that I used to. I make coffee and sit down with a book. Sometimes - often, if I'm honest - I do less reading than I do just staring out the window, breathing into a silence that continues to know me better than I know myself. I somewhat stubbornly continue to push the boundary of how much time I can spend with it before I'm late for work.

I'm not sure where I was headed with this. It's summer, and darkness is harder to find, and I miss it even when the morning light is perfect.