At 4:07 a.m., a leaf dropped from the avocado plant in the bedroom, confirming what I already pretty much knew: I was awake, again, and almost certainly would be until I gave in and got up. Just a leaf.
There had been a dry, papery rustle as it fell onto the other houseplants below, the sound sharpening my attention the way sudden and unexpected noises do. I’d been half-awake before that, drifting hopefully on the edge of returning to sleep. But there’s a point when you’ve surfaced enough from sleep’s ocean to know you won’t be going back.
It happens a lot now, especially in these times of worry.
There are times for counting your blessings, but the silence of the darkest early morning is for counting your fears, when the dreams have jarred you awake and already set you on the path of distress.
It’s hard not to let your brain latch onto things, there in the half-light: what happens if the job stops, what if you slip and drop all the balls you’re frantically trying to keep in the air? Where is the world going to be next, as the order you’ve always expected seems to be slipping away, both stupidly and unstoppably?
And family. Is everyone safe? Does silence mean things are fine and there’s no need to communicate, or are distant ships sinking, with no way to reach the radio room? When you shift next to worries about health — yours and others — then, sir, then you are finished.
There’s a point when you’ve surfaced enough from sleep’s ocean to know you won’t be going back.
I got up, made coffee, opened the window so that the cat could smell the outside air and listen to the morning seagulls and the discussing crows. She is, as always, a chat-bag: much has apparently happened as she was guarding the night-hall and moonlight rooms.
Later, on Twitter, I saw there had been an online roll call of people I know, posting that they were awake as well: at 3:20 a.m., at four, at four-thirty, at five. So it’s hardly only me. There is a confederacy of the sleepless, a loose skein of the unwilling awake.
Like me, I suppose, shuffling out earlier than they’d like into the day, their streets, like mine, empty and quiet.
I love early mornings, the way that thoughts and senses are sharp and clear, the way individual days catalogue themselves in my head. If I were to compare this early morning to another, the cool stillness of the air, the damp breath of the pavement from overnight rain, I would index it exactly alongside a 2016 September morning in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, where I shaved without shaving cream or hot water, facing a bright steel mirror in an empty public washroom. Back, that is, when you could do such things.
Funny that, years apart, two different mornings could feel so entwined. The only way I can describe it is that the morning air had exactly the same kind of heft.
But, for all that love, I know the price of lost sleep, too: on health, on relationships, on life in general.
I also know that, often, the best work lives in discord; sometimes, the price has to be paid in the currency of our own discomfort.
I miss steady sleep — to fall like a brick into a dreamless well, and be jarred out of it by the alarm a solid eight hours later.
No matter how many early mornings I’ve got stocked in my head, I cannot remember my last unbroken night. (Don’t worry, avocado. I’ll still water you.)
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
