The Start

There is something so personal about waking up early in the morning, when the sky is still dark, the horizon smudged with purple lights. If I catch myself right, I can wake up right in between sleep cycles around 4:30am. A horrible time if I let myself think about, because I love few things more than sleep. The whole process of sleep has been a life long love affair. But slowly, in weekly snatches from the last four years, the hours before dawn have been romancing me.

There is a thought that always enters my minds on those dark mornings, that there is still a significant number of people slumbering in their beds, dreading the alarm that is soon to go off. I find myself smiling over that thought, of all those bodies warm and snug in so many houses all around me.

There are a few, whose houses are all ready bright with lights, whose kitchen smells of coffee and cereals. A few kindred spirits. Us, who wake early to start the day. Us, who know that the early morning hour has the potential to pause the forward motion of time, just so we can get more done. Truly, there is a limbo to those few hours before the world whirls into motion.

There are even fewer who walk the dark morning, enjoying the cool breeze, the lack of traffic and sometimes the late to bed nocturnal animals. A few mornings, I have walked with streets covered in frogs. A few mornings, it has been so dense with fog that the day seems to have slipped between worlds, and we have some how ended up in a fairy tale. There have been mornings where the darkness let's words that are so raw and true slip from my lips to the ears of a dear confidant. In those hours, life is so detached so open to reality instead of the events and things that fill our days.

Tomorrow, I will start waking between cycles again. I will embrace the darkness of the new day. I will turn my face to the East and greet the purple smudges on the horizon with a smile and more likely a prayer. The start is always there.