I never understood morning people; up with the sun, fresh start to the day.  Maybe it’s  because the sun has always felt like my enemy, or that I woke up hung over (a lot), or maybe I have always been a little bit off kilter, out of step and misshapen. I could never find a rhythm among the sun worshipping masses.

I was the quintessential night person; awake until 2 or 3, getting up anywhere from 11am to 2pm, depending on how much I drank the night before.  I loved the feeling of decadence that came with being awake when risk was alight in the city, and anything could happen.  I reveled in the quickening pulse of everything that comes after midnight.  I felt alive and creative in the late night hours.  But, time has a way of fucking with you, speeding  by so fast that one morning you wake up, middle-aged, hung over and feeling like crap. The hours beyond midnight have lost their allure.

So now, at 48, I am an in between person;  I get up at 4am, when the city is at its most quiet and the darkness protects me from the clamor and chaos of the sun. The world is so still, I feel illicit and delicious, a willing trespasser.  4am doesn’t feel like morning or night, but breathes beautifully somewhere in between; it is an introverts safe haven, a time for creativity to be uncloaked.I feel energized by the silence so early in the morning and empowered because I am awake for the arrival of the sun, rather than assaulted at noon by the strike of its barbs through cracks in the curtains.

I am writing more than ever now, in these hours when I feel like the world is all mine.  I sit at my desk, in love with the fingers of darkness, getting lost in the words; I watch the day tumble softly in through the windows, grateful to be one of the in-between people.