Hours, give or take

4AM, and your eyes open, with the lucidity of one who has regained sight after a decade in darkness, to the muted room you fell asleep in some inadequate number of hours ago. The city is in a silver silence, save for the wind blowing over slicked asphalt roads and a heartbeat you named your own. You see, in visions of fireworks, as the one who moulded this diorama, and you command the multitudes, captivated by the shackles of slumber you have cast off. Here in the quiet you lord over all thoughts, all desires, and you expel them, leaving only a canvas of white that shall fade into colours as the day rises; still, you layer the primer and the paint, over and over, wordless, awake.

Sometime in the early afternoon, you sleep with a carnal ferocity, with a lust after the contours of those five minute dreams, vivid and ephemeral and gone before you can forget them, those dreams that you wished to have lasted longer and by which you come to despise the second, and third, and fourth notes of the song you had repeatedly and naïvely hoped would bring you gentle into the waking world, but instead plunge you deeper into irrational depths and immobile ecstasies of new moments thought to be old and old moments thought to be new and a numbing disorientation/disorienting numbness oppressive and vague and blue/green and calling you to believe in the reality of it all—or nothing at all.

You’ve just made it to your desk, but have somehow spent all the effort required in a day of work just to put down your backpack, with no results (or even attempts) to show for it. So you head for the espresso machine, pull two shots, pretend like you are capable of latte art, and stare into an amateur Rorschach test haphazardly administered and invoking nothing but anger and a dull and ambiguous gastric discomfort telling you you’ve had both too much and too little. It heeds you to find answers; you walk back to your spot and sit down, sipping away at the asymmetries, and put each thing in front of you into its place. And then you get up, to go make your second cup of coffee.

It’s a bit past midnight, and your consciousness wavers somewhere between ‘pretty awake’ and ‘could go to bed in an hour or so’. You are assaulted by everything and nothing indiscriminately: Tlön and labyrinths, Kafka and Proteus, the ticking of the clock you thought you took the battery out of and the rising sun six thousand miles away. In some perverse, masochistic manner, I suppose you enjoy it, when the hours come and go, wild and effortless. It’s sacrilegious, a sin, you tell me, that the minutes are unaccounted for, but you are glad to be free, because there is nothing that makes you feel more alive, and that you enjoy journey and destination equally. I nod. It’s 4AM again.