It’s 3:23 am and I can’t sleep.
This time is foreign to me; forbidden even. I couldn’t even stay up for the 3am version of Midnights, although Paris is one of my favorite songs.
I’m so in love I might stop breathing
Except I’m not.
I most certainly didn’t relate to the rest of Taylor’s songs about the midnights that feel like afternoons, at least I didn’t until I found myself mysteriously opening my laptop and writing. I could lowkey go for a coffee, start my day and take a nap by 10am!
It’s so quiet… peaceful when the rest of the world is rightfully asleep. I used to fear the dark. As a child, I would wake up one of the animals so I wouldn’t need to face it alone, or I would climb into my sister’s pile of FAO Schwartz dogs and lay there, hoping the proximity to someone else would help me feel safe enough to fall asleep.
If I was feeling especially bold, I would wake up one of my parents depending on who had custody. If it was my Mom, I’d climb into bed with her, far past the acceptable age. I think the most recent time I did this was college.
If I was with my Dad, I would feign illness, just so that I wouldn’t need to say I was scared. Or maybe I started doing this after I got in trouble for waking him up out of fear one too many times.
It wasn’t that I necessarily that I had insomnia, more so that I was terribly afraid.
I was so afraid of everything; ghosts, intruders, being alone with my own thoughts.
One time I woke up my Dad after 4am, to which he replied “the ghosts would be asleep by now” a desperate side comment I clung onto as fact.
I’d go into these compulsive states of refusing to check the clock if I did awaken, cursing it if I so much as caught a glance and it said something dumb like 3:29 or alas! 2:58.
I’d look at the clock, begging it to change.
It just made me feel so alone, the world so still, the darkness so far from fading. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that in the past year, I haven’t grabbed for a book when I wake up during the mysterious hour of 3am, finally feeling safe enough to go back to bed when the clock finally inched closer to 4.
Tonight, however, I don’t feel afraid. I feel brave, and maybe even a little embraced by this sense of nocturnal creativity. The kind of call I’ve always been too afraid to answer; the part of myself I’ve forgotten, or never fully allowed myself to be.
I’ve been asking myself the question lately, of where all the fear within my body originated, why it was my primary stress response, and how I could let it fully release. I find no coincidence in the answer revealing itself to me in the most intimate of times, in the middle of the night alone with my thoughts at a time that while may not have been the source, certainly was the time I felt the most safe to feel the sensation.
I’m ready to be the woman who embraces the dark instead of hiding behind it in fear.