You haven’t done that yet
I know
You haven’t done that either
Yes, I know.
I’m not trying to be awkward here but, well, how are you going to get all those things done tomorrow if you also have tomorrow’s stuff to do? You don’t know yet what tomorrow’s going to bring
Yes, I know that too, but there’s only so much time in the day. I can’t do it all. I’ll worry about that tomorrow.
Well, I think you should consider it now. Right now. Ooooh, your left leg is cramping a bit. Feel that? Now I come to think of it, I reckon you could probably do with nipping to the toilet too.
Really?
This interior dialogue with my own takes place “in the wee small hours” of most days. I have always been an early riser, and that border country between sleep and wakefulness has always been tumultuous and hotly contested – some days I win, some I lose.
I am truly grateful for some of the things I have inherited from my father – my music tastes, including a love for Simon and Garfunkel, Gerry Rafferty and Roxy Music for one, a generous streak being another. There are some about which I am indifferent – certain facial gestures, moments of awkward posture and so on. I always remember having a conversation with my sister about how our father seemed to be turning into our grandfather. “You know what that means”, she replied. “You’re turning into dad.” The one thing, though, for which I am not grateful, not even the slightest tiny fraction, is my flimsy sleep patterns. “Don’t be so daft”, you might say. “You can’t inherit poor sleep patterns!” This, however, is a widely debated area, and many believe that poor sleep is actually an inherited trait. I myself am convinced of this, as sure as broken night follows day.
I can still clearly recall many nights, young as I was, being woken from a deep sleep by the sudden creak of floorboards in the dark and a shuffling sound out on the upstairs landing. Not once was I afraid that it was a burglar or a bogeyman, for I knew that it was just dad picking up the broken pieces of another shattered night and carrying them downstairs to deal with them quietly, out of sight and sound of the rest of us.
These days it is another night, another landing in a different house, but still it is the sound of a Smith shushing quietly down the stairs with no more than the whisper of a sweeping dressing gown hemline and a careful tread.
I have tried to roll with the temporal punches and make the most of this situation, coming to love those pre-dawn hours in the same way that a captive might develop Stockholm syndrome. Even when my sleep isn’t broken I am an early riser and so have built my day around this, rising at four every day to write, read, and reconcile myself with the thought of long hours to come. Even so, for me, the veil between the sleeping world and the wakeful one is flimsy and easily shredded, meaning that I am often up even before this alarm – three-thirty, two o’ clock, even one o’ clock some days.
For most people, the line of wakefulness is set at around six o’clock in the morning, that moment when the new day is ready to commence and they begin the first stirrings as they slowly surface like swimmers from their deepest dreams before finally waking up around seven. Behind this line, all those thoughts, chores, concerns and hang-ups ready to be carried over are building up, waiting to spill into the next day, when they will become a consideration and a bullet point on the ‘to-do’ list once more. For me, that line is drawn at midnight, and it is a fragile one. As soon as the clock ticks past twelve, it starts to distort and warp at the edges with the weight of what it holds back. I suspect that, in our increasingly frenetic, overburdened modern world, a growing number of people feel this way. Our lives literally contain too much – too much choice in television programmes, too much to do in any twenty-four-hour period, too much 24/7 accessibility through email and social media, too much for the brain to process, meaning that line holds back far more of a burden these days than it ever has at any other time in human history. Sometimes it stands firm, sometimes it does not.
Time to get up now
But I don’t want to.
You don’t have a choice
No, I don’t.
I rise, carting with me a head full of jangling thoughts about the day to come.
Here, though, is where things become frustrating. Early wakefulness is always a fleeting experience, one of those moments in which we encounter will-o’-the-wisp thoughts that immediately shrink and crumble to ash when the brain turns the light of considered thought on to them. Those concerns, which seemed so significant and such a major issue only minutes before, seem suddenly to wilt away and become inconsequential as soon as they are given any consideration, finally disappearing back into the shadows and leaving you stood there alone like some eccentric who has just wandered in off the street. Too late now; you are awake. There are mornings upon which you think that where the world goes you do not wish to follow, at least not right then, but sill the insomniacs and early risers inevitably find themselves pulled along in its unseen undertow. There is hardly ever a choice. The last vestiges of sleepiness ebb, leaving you stranded on an island of wakefulness from which there is no retreat, with nothing but a time on your hands, time in which you will contemplate everything, including loneliness.
To be wakeful on a regular basis like this is sometimes a lonely place to be. After the final, lingering traces of those thoughts and internal conversations have ebbed, all a person wants or needs sometimes is to speak to another human being, to have that interaction, and to lack this is to feel that acute loneliness. Tough luck. Your loved ones are asleep upstairs, and so your lot is to stand sentinel over the quiet house until dawn arrives to take over.
So you do what anybody would in this situation. You make a coffee to kick-start the day, taking this outside, possibly, to check that the world is still in place, that, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, the world has “like a wanderer, come back” and “the sky gathered again”, though it is weak at first, a moony-blue morning in the making where the depth of night is diluted by a risen, milky moon. You remain there, watching this gradual process for the length of that coffee cup, until the sky stretches through bands of blue and purple, a spectrum of wakefulness that forms a Litmus sky.
You take the last swig and a final look up and read what the dawn is trying to tell you: the day will be fine and bright. Despite all of the darkness, it seems that everything is going to be alright.
