I like waking when it’s still dark. My body remembers: Disneyland before traffic, a field-trip bus idling outside, a long drive up the coast to Orcas Island. Coffee even when it made me shake — less for caffeine than ceremony.
All night, the air stays cool and still; scents fall and hold close to the ground. At first light, they rise. Plants open their pores, the earth exhales geosmin. Dawn smells like movement about to happen. Our sense of smell sharpens after sleep. Maybe that’s why the hour feels alive.
My apartment goes library-quiet. I move as if tending an altar no one will see. Witchy, but mostly private: the only time in a long day not already claimed. Since coming back to Los Angeles I’ve made my life small. I clean slowly. Touch my own skin — not seduction, just proof it’s there.
Dreams arrive uninvited. My mother often calls the mornings after I dream of her. I once heard of nonverbal autistic children who meet in sleep and call it the hill — a wordless network under the waking world. Some nights I wake sure I’m back in my parents’ house, listening for the first fight. Then I remember: this is my own studio. Relief floods in, sharp and almost unbelievable. Dreams collapse time: they return what’s lost, then morning takes it back. I wake to a damp pillow from dreaming of you and wonder why you never came.
The dark before sunrise gives me a reprieve: solitude, scent, memory. Joy returns here first — quiet, almost secret.
These hours hold a blankness before the day decides what it will be. No email. No texts. No one asking. A side door in time where I can exist without performance. After years of living at the mercy of other people’s moods, this small autonomy feels radical.
I suppose I’m healing. I’m still tired most days. But there is dignity in tending a life before the world wakes, and a quiet satisfaction in small routines. They keep me moving while I wrestle with the larger things.
Kettle on. Coffee scent. Medication. Plants leaning toward light. No audience. No one to measure my worth. Just me, breathing before the day grows loud.
Healing is rarely cinematic. No sudden transformation. Mostly it’s this: one quiet morning after another. A smell, a sliver of adventure, the world unclaimed for a while — enough to try again.
Wonder isn’t naïve. The world stays violent, absurd. Sometimes the only way through is to notice something beautiful before anyone wakes to deny it.
I write to hold those small flames before they vanish, a record that I was alive and capable of awe, even tired, even unsure. One morning, possible.
Marvelous!!! The way each one of your sentences can be interpreted as a whole new story has me love-sick with your writing. And, I have always believed, being able to share/ write one’s emotions and experiences brings clarity (to self and others). Thank you.