I missed posting last month due to an unforeseen circumstance: I was in the middle of the last stage of metamorphosis.

Unlike the unlucky Gregor Samsa, I emerged from mine more or less intact: proper number of limbs and no crawling around the kitchen floor for leftovers*.

Mine seems to have taken on a slightly darker aspect, at least you’d think so if you looked out my window right now where it’s currently O’Dark–In-The-Morning.

Digression #1: For the record – my computer is telling me the current time is 2:57am. No temperature is noted, however it feels colder inside than the 62 degrees the thermostat is insisting it is as pants are almost always optional before 7:00am in California.**

Given the symptoms [restlessness, fatigue, grumpy demeanor when dealing with teenage/father drama, waking up around one or two in the morning every day for weeks no matter how late I went to bed…] I was afraid I was experiencing the onset of age-induced insomnia…that first crack in my psychic glacier foretelling the beginning of the end.

What was next? Wrinkles?

Sure, I’d been “highlighting” my hair a little more heavily over recent years… and the bevy of greys sprouting on familiar heads around my same age was just a cruel joke—like the one about the writer who has teenage daughter in High School? Yeah, that one isn’t so funny anymore.

So I was starting to worry. A little.

I was devolving into a creature of the night and I was tired as hell from fighting it.

I was tired of waking my husband up, night after night (my wakefulness was driving him nuts, though he was kind enough not to say so). Once I began staying downstairs to avoid disturbing him, all pretense of a normal schedule flew out the window. I fluffed the pillows on the daybed and filled my slack hours until Morpheus claimed me with movies or reading. My bedtime went from 11:30 or midnight, to one or two in the morning. when I let it slip to 3:00am I realized things were seriously screwed up.

Digression #2: My Rule About Sleep. As long as you are in your bed, eyes closed before 3:00am it counts as going to bed normally and you won’t feel that awful gritty, dead-eyed fatigue that you feel when you have an all-nighter. Once 3:00am light’s up the face of your clock/iPhone/watch you might as well give it up and go round the corner for the whole 24 hours and try again the next day. Seriously. Trying to pretend you’re not going to suffer on two hours of sleep is just fooling yourself. This is why caffeine was invented.

It was a late text from Paris that made me realize there was another possible explanation for the eyes-popping-open-like-they-were-on-a-timer, thing that was throwing me into a state of panic….

 Life had pressed the reset button.

After this night I’d come to understand that I’d been undergoing a fundamental shift on my axis: without the artificial constructs of a daily schedule—I was turning feral—my internal clock, winding itself back decades to my near original state of teenaged vampirism.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On this particular day I retreated downstairs about 1:00 am, after dozing for a few fruitless hours, to read and watch some Benedict Cumberbatch, when my phone chirped at me…

Digression #3: re: Benedict Cumberbatch Did you know he was in a HBO miniseries ‘The End of The Parade’? Very BBC-does-Sherlock-Holmes’-ancestor. All the brilliance and twice the angst in five parts, great middle-of-the-night viewing fare since it moves so slowly you can successfully do three things at once and not miss anything important.

…I hadn’t heard from my friend in ages, and really who wants to talk about your feelings when they’re rocky and unpleasant? It’s what we have cats and spouses for. But I’d recently congratulated him on some good news and he does have manners, so he’d probably hoped he could sneak in a quick hello/thank you/goodbye and run back out into the Paris sunshine having done his duty. Instead he found me awake.

We spent the next couple of hours casually chatting back and forth while I kept half an eye on Benedict’s brilliance and unsettling blonde dye job. Nice. It wasn’t until we were finished that I realized something had changed.

Like tumblers frozen in a lock suddenly giving way, I felt the release of something finally clicking into place:

4:00am felt great.

And so did 3:00am.

And 2:00am.

And even1:00am.

They all felt great.

Not only that, they all felt right. 

I was not sleepless. I was awake.

All this angst coincided with a recent change in my day job: I was now working full time from my home office and it had taken over my waking hours, skewing my routine so thoroughly that I’d lost the parts of the day that I used to claim for myself. I’d been grappling with this issue from the start, had rationalized my needful acceptance, unwilling to force a more conventional solution—there were upsides, benefits, it was complicated. Apparently the loss of boundaries weighed more heavily on my psyche than I realized, providing the spark to ignite the radical change to come:

Instead of insomnia, I’d been returned to a variant on my native state of the night-owlism that reigned from my mid-teens until my late twenties, when “real life” set in—now, instead of staying up late, I was rising early.

As soon as I embraced the change, I started writing again.

It was like magic.

I’m not sure if I’m writing because I’m up at 3:00am every day or I’m up at 3:00am everyday because I needed a time to write (something that had been eluding me for the past five months). Whichever the reason, it’s working for me.

I hope you embrace the weirdness that works for you.

(Now) Nocturnally Yours,

LE Franks

 

*That was a clue, referring back to my English Lit days. Feel free to Google, and read for god’s sake.

 

**Please use your pants responsibly. Opting out is probably pretty low risk… rarely do you see a sign on the local minimart refusing service to the pantsless, after all. While I can’t be held responsible for your own constabulary’s views on the matter, who am I to deny you the experience of feeling a night’s breeze ruffling the fine hairs of legs, glowing whitely under the light of the full moon? But please, do remember—safety first: slip on your Doc Martins and put on a shirt before you go and make that doughnut run—it’s cold out there at 3:00am.