Saturday, April 18, 2015
3 AM
3AM
I heard somewhere that every man is alone at 3am. Or maybe the phrasing was backwards and that 3am will find every man alone. It's a distant echo in my head, like the memory of remembering something, the words a spidery script carried on crumbling paper or perhaps a faint tune. The impression comes to me frequently, like a riddle I'm too proud to look up, and flits through the corner of my mind usually at around 3am since this is an hour I see fairly regularly. The counter point is a Donald Justice poem that I studied nightly for three months when I was 18 because I really wasn't able to do anything else but that is a different story for another time.
3am is my hour. It's been lone and lonely, the end of a party, the start of a day. I have drifted away cold and alone while wrapped in warm arms and I have woke from nightmares to watch the clock brand the time into my eyes. I don't know why this hour has an affinity for me but things in my life tend to work like that; I'm all patterns and circles, tragically charmed with an awkward grace.
There is a feeling, a state I slip into or a cloak I wear...it has a name I won't use here because it will distract you with assumptions or prompt judgment. This feeling is closest at 3am like a paper spinning wheel that equates hours to colors; 3am is always a cloudy gray. You can peer into it and see anything from Bob Ross clouds to the witch trapped in the doorway of your childhood bed room who beckoned you to come stand in the in betweens.
Note: You never want to get trapped in the in betweens. I used to get trapped in between dream and awake until I shut down my dreams. I always got the impression that my dreams were fighting a battle where half of them wanted to tell me things and the other half were trying to swallow me up. I try to stay off their battle ground as I don't care for the concept of "collateral damage" and "acceptable loss" being applied to me.
The lessons I take away from my experiences are rarely logical to others without a flow chart and careful explanation so suffice it to say that when I was young I learned the value of digging my own oubliette and hiding all my anger, hurt, loneliness, hope, disappointment, fear, shame and doubt along with all the memories that call them forth in it. Building layer upon layer of locks and walls around that hole to hold all I fed it made it endlessly deep and impossibly high. While the sun never reaches it, 3am lines it up for the stars. 3am sees my whispered secrets and stinging tears as my demons reach for the stars while I shrink trembling and terrified into the nearest shadow counting the seconds desperate to escape their notice.
I believe that in the darkest heart of the night, for at least an hour, you stand alone in existence. You are like an acrobat on the highest wire with one tiny spotlight and no net. I believe that 3am holds a glimpse of eternity.
I don't have to believe that at 3am there is no water hot enough to wash the pain away. there is no hand to hold. there is no one to call because there are no words that make sense. at 3am the only voices you hear are the ones you buried and your own distant keening.
3am is when everything you fight... fights back.
I heard somewhere that every man is alone at 3am. Or maybe the phrasing was backwards and that 3am will find every man alone. It's a distant echo in my head, like the memory of remembering something, the words a spidery script carried on crumbling paper or perhaps a faint tune. The impression comes to me frequently, like a riddle I'm too proud to look up, and flits through the corner of my mind usually at around 3am since this is an hour I see fairly regularly. The counter point is a Donald Justice poem that I studied nightly for three months when I was 18 because I really wasn't able to do anything else but that is a different story for another time.
3am is my hour. It's been lone and lonely, the end of a party, the start of a day. I have drifted away cold and alone while wrapped in warm arms and I have woke from nightmares to watch the clock brand the time into my eyes. I don't know why this hour has an affinity for me but things in my life tend to work like that; I'm all patterns and circles, tragically charmed with an awkward grace.
There is a feeling, a state I slip into or a cloak I wear...it has a name I won't use here because it will distract you with assumptions or prompt judgment. This feeling is closest at 3am like a paper spinning wheel that equates hours to colors; 3am is always a cloudy gray. You can peer into it and see anything from Bob Ross clouds to the witch trapped in the doorway of your childhood bed room who beckoned you to come stand in the in betweens.
Note: You never want to get trapped in the in betweens. I used to get trapped in between dream and awake until I shut down my dreams. I always got the impression that my dreams were fighting a battle where half of them wanted to tell me things and the other half were trying to swallow me up. I try to stay off their battle ground as I don't care for the concept of "collateral damage" and "acceptable loss" being applied to me.
The lessons I take away from my experiences are rarely logical to others without a flow chart and careful explanation so suffice it to say that when I was young I learned the value of digging my own oubliette and hiding all my anger, hurt, loneliness, hope, disappointment, fear, shame and doubt along with all the memories that call them forth in it. Building layer upon layer of locks and walls around that hole to hold all I fed it made it endlessly deep and impossibly high. While the sun never reaches it, 3am lines it up for the stars. 3am sees my whispered secrets and stinging tears as my demons reach for the stars while I shrink trembling and terrified into the nearest shadow counting the seconds desperate to escape their notice.
I believe that in the darkest heart of the night, for at least an hour, you stand alone in existence. You are like an acrobat on the highest wire with one tiny spotlight and no net. I believe that 3am holds a glimpse of eternity.
I don't have to believe that at 3am there is no water hot enough to wash the pain away. there is no hand to hold. there is no one to call because there are no words that make sense. at 3am the only voices you hear are the ones you buried and your own distant keening.
3am is when everything you fight... fights back.
Labels: 3am, Confessions, Insomnia, TMI
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