Up Late And Thinking, As Is The Habit

Try as I might, and hope as I will, I'm afraid that I will always be a Night Person. Take right now, tonight for instance. It's just after twelve midnight, and all I can do is sit on the couch and enjoy the stillness. No cars pass on my otherwise busy street, the windows are open, and the Mountain Goats emote quietly on the stereo. Again, the stillness is breathtaking.

It all takes me back to my parent's house; a house in what, to some, may still be the country. In reality, it is a house in a not quite suburb, a development that encroached, twenty years ago, into the woods and farmland that still surround it. While strip malls and civilization may be knocking now, the Chisholm Creek still flows behind, and deer and bobcats still silently navigate the woods behind, and surrounding, in all cardinal directions. My favorite time was always night, when the stars popped in a way that I've only seen in a few other places in the world; places far more remote. I would open my windows and lay in bed listening to the calls of coyotes rising above a chorus of insects and frogs, dreaming of places far away; dreaming of a life that I am still chasing.

Here I am now, on this couch, in a city far away, longing for the past and thinking of the future, and wishing that I could hold on to this moment forever. It's been a long time since I've greeted the dawn, and I have no desire to. Morning is best experienced as early as possible after a good night's sleep, and it's not in me to want to stay up late and go to bed when the sun rises. If I sleep past nine, even on a weekend, I feel filthy and lazy, and fret about the daylight that I've wasted. It's something of a paradox, admittedly, but a paradox that, I believe must come with old age and the push and pull of responsibility and the last of your wastrel youth. These days, these nights, of staying up late, they don't come so often, and they feel numbered. It's hard not to want to hold onto them, tomorrow be damned.

Tomorrow, however, always comes. The alarm goes off, and I rouse myself, cursing my laziness should I sleep past eight, and I push myself through a day that passes in a haze -- until roughly nine pm or so, when I encounter what I believe is called a "second wind". The hours always seem to drag after five, six, seven, until the clock hits ten that is, and suddenly there is so much that I have to fit in before my scheduled bedtime within the hour. Often I get into bed with the computer and watch just one more episode of The Office, and suddenly it's nearly one am, and all I can do is marvel at where all the time has gone.

For now though, I'm here. Hanging on to what I have, mourning what I've lost, and hoping that some day I can reconcile the two. The stillness is calming, the lamplight hides the dirt on my rug, and, while melancholy, there is something that I can identify as an uneasy contentment. It is an embrace of this fleeting life for whatever it is, and I can't imagine that's such a bad thing.