Morning Is A Long Time Coming
Morning Is A Long Time Coming
At three AM everything seems much bigger and scarier than it would at a more lucid hour. This is possibly because there is rarely much of a frame of reference when you're sitting in your room in the dark, half dressed, dishevelled with exhaustion, your eyes and shirt tails trailing off the edge of your chair. Your grasp of common reality starts to escape you. This is the time when no insanity is beyond your wearied mind, no heartache too implausible, and no catastrophe unlikely. Anything could happen.
I think there's a reason suicides seem to happen at night. It's then that everything goes black, you're all alone, and you want the blackness to take you along with it when it leaves. It's an elegant departure, sailing into the wings, not tripping off the edge of the stage in disgrace.
Then there is the blackness less complete but far more common. An imperfect blackness, tinged with light enough that you see only yourself. Every twisted, malignant, incorrect, blasphemous part of yourself. You hate the twilight glimpses of imperfect flesh, the gloomy edges of a profane and frightening thought inside you, crawling between your ribs, out into the flesh you despise.
Sleep has left you barren and shifting, like a discontented sea. You lie in the darkness, and you hurt, your limbs ache, your body is wracked with the pain of exhaustion and paranoia. This isn't the first night you've spent hovering near tears, your eyes red, but too proud to shed their salted tears, which you know will burn like accusatory iron. You cannot cry and you cannot sleep.
It does not get light for many many hours, hours of shifting and sobbing, choking on words unspoken or unknown. You pray to a god you've long since forgotten that some coherence will manifest itself before you must pretend to rouse yourself from slumber. Before you have to leave your temple, your torture chamber, the horrible comforting blackness, leave it and wash your face, smile and talk and fill out papers. You pray. It is still not light, and will not be for hours. Morning is a long time coming.
At three AM everything seems much bigger and scarier than it would at a more lucid hour. This is possibly because there is rarely much of a frame of reference when you're sitting in your room in the dark, half dressed, dishevelled with exhaustion, your eyes and shirt tails trailing off the edge of your chair. Your grasp of common reality starts to escape you. This is the time when no insanity is beyond your wearied mind, no heartache too implausible, and no catastrophe unlikely. Anything could happen.
I think there's a reason suicides seem to happen at night. It's then that everything goes black, you're all alone, and you want the blackness to take you along with it when it leaves. It's an elegant departure, sailing into the wings, not tripping off the edge of the stage in disgrace.
Then there is the blackness less complete but far more common. An imperfect blackness, tinged with light enough that you see only yourself. Every twisted, malignant, incorrect, blasphemous part of yourself. You hate the twilight glimpses of imperfect flesh, the gloomy edges of a profane and frightening thought inside you, crawling between your ribs, out into the flesh you despise.
Sleep has left you barren and shifting, like a discontented sea. You lie in the darkness, and you hurt, your limbs ache, your body is wracked with the pain of exhaustion and paranoia. This isn't the first night you've spent hovering near tears, your eyes red, but too proud to shed their salted tears, which you know will burn like accusatory iron. You cannot cry and you cannot sleep.
It does not get light for many many hours, hours of shifting and sobbing, choking on words unspoken or unknown. You pray to a god you've long since forgotten that some coherence will manifest itself before you must pretend to rouse yourself from slumber. Before you have to leave your temple, your torture chamber, the horrible comforting blackness, leave it and wash your face, smile and talk and fill out papers. You pray. It is still not light, and will not be for hours. Morning is a long time coming.
posted by Andrew at 10:59 PM
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