Today I woke up at six.
Yesterday and the day before I woke up at six. On Saturday it was close to seven. Friday, six fifteen.
Do you sense a trend?
.
In our old house sleep was a black box.
I remember the conversation we had when we first moved in. Three bedrooms, and only the front and back ones were big enough to hold E’s queen-sized bed.
“Well, the front is bigger – more room around the bed, and for beaureaus and things. But it’s at the front of the house – streelights, cars passing, people talking, kids playing – it will all be in the bedroom with us.”
We wound up in the back. Smaller, cozier, and immune to all that street noise. Except, the backyard world of our home had its own noise – yapping dogs and yellow security lights, always on watch.
We adapted. I slept some nights with headphones, or earplugs. Our curtains were blackouts, thick and inpenetrable. Eventually E bought me a sunrise clock complete with chirping birds, so I could still wake up with some semblance of morning in my life – even in the black box.
.
People joked that I would be freaked out by the quiet at our new house. They weren’t wrong. Everything is silent at night (save for crickets), with everyone tucked into their discrete living rooms hundreds of feet from our door.
Sometimes I feel sheepish even playing guitar, before Elise reminds me that they could easily be doing that (or louder!) in their own homes. Such as is the silent expanse of our street.
Our bedroom is in the front of the house. No earplugs. Yes, blackout curtains, but not drawn carefully across every inch of every window from frame to frame. It’s just out of habit – to make sure no moonlight falls across my body as I drift to sleep.
The difference is the morning. Still quiet. Still no traffic. Yet in place of the sunrise clock I have … sunrise.
It turns out, I’m a morning person. For five years I had fooled myself, because my tiny electric sun was no replacement for an entire world of delicately spun light.
Tomorrow I will probably wake up at six.
