5th November 2024
2 am is a place I'm finding myself at lately a few times too often for my liking.
I heard a cover recently of "Stand by Me" by Stephen Jr. and I don't think I've ever heard anything like it before. His voice just cuts through the dark, and the way he strums the guitar makes it sound like there are drums pounding behind him, and the way he plucks on the top strings sounds like a Morse code heartbeat.
He's keeping me company as I sit at my desk while my fingers lose their feeling, and my vision starts to blur. It used to be such a secret, stolen thing to stay up late at night. I remember the first time I stayed up all night. I didn't want to be found, so I wrapped myself up in the curtain, and of course, no one found me. I just sat there. I didn't have a watch or anything, but I sensed it getting brighter, and suddenly it was day.
The thing with staying up all night is that you don't feel like you belong. All of it is real, but you, somehow, aren't. It's the closest thing to being a ghost, I think. Your body (and heart) is still in yesterday.
I look at the clock ticking steadily to more irrational numbers on the top right of my screen as I sit here with you and with me. It's a curse to be here. When dark has not only fallen but settled like a heavy cloak, the sadness can sometimes let itself in like a dog that knows its home.
Just as I have been circling like a bird, unable to truly land, I feel like I am a nomad in time - setting up a life in different moments where there are many people and sometimes none at all. I've been fortunate enough to paddle to the middle of a lagoon in the Pacific Ocean and look back upon the volcanic mountains. I've also been lucky enough to walk in circles around the parks of Oslo looking at a moon that hung so heavy I thought it would bend the clouds. Yet, I could not stay. In the same way, I throw myself into the night. I write and write like a little badger digging for the bedrock upon which I can finally rest.
Both the big dreams and the big questions come to meet me at this time; old friends at the bar. I understand why people call each other over when it gets this late. They gnaw at you, The Questions. When you are held in someone's arms, you realize that they don't have to be answered, and perhaps they're not actually meant to be.
I knew someone once. She used to make fun of me because I would say that every day is a new day. I mean, it is. We can start again; isn't that beautiful? What I really tried to say was that every day with her made me feel new. But you don't get to choose how words come out sometimes.
The beautiful failure that we call expression makes me think of a passage I opened to randomly in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where he says the attempt every generation is to tell the untellable. To attempt to recreate a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space, to speak of a truth that would shatter the dichotomy of right and wrong.
And I think of "Stand by Me" again. When the sky that we look upon and the mountains have crumbled into the sea, will you stand by me? I wonder if when the walls of the day have broken down, would you sit with me in the rubble? When all is torn asunder, will you be there?
That is the thing, isn't it? The most precious thing about falling asleep with someone is to leave the world together and then travel to the next together. Perhaps my personal rebellion at 2 am is against leaving this world alone. I thumb my cigarette on the cliffside of time and refuse and refuse.
As the ground falls away from beneath me, I have to give in. I will let go and begin anew, but I won't forget this place, and I won't be away for long.