A Song for the Nocturnal
I woke up again and knew I wasn’t going back to sleep.
The alarm wasn’t even close to waking up. The cracked light through my drapes showed the indigo sky—a shade I’ve come to refer to as “you’re not sleeping tonight” blue. I looked at my phone but already knew what it would read before the screen turned on: 3am.
It was the third night in a row I’ve woken up at this time. In the past, options to tackle this insomnia were aplenty: I could go back to sleep after a drink of water. I could read and drift off. I could even play some video games until sleep lulled me back. But lately, my mind pulls the body along a joyride of thought. It starts and doesn’t stop. It has become loud and uncontrollable, like a child. In dead silence this time brings, my mind wakes before my body can at 3am.
3am. Historically, I’ve gotten along with this time.
One could say I’ve preferred the night in my life. At sleepovers as a kid, I would be the one advocating the group to stay up until the sun showed. Back then, the time was a milestone; a flag of victory signaling the defeat of the moon. “Insomnia” was a Latin phrase in the pockets of history we would never know.
In high school, I worked for a coffee shop in the Boston Logan Airport. It was a good gig and paid well, but the only catch was I had to be at the airport by 4am. They needed someone to be willing to wake up that early to arrive at the airport and help pass the holy donuts, drinks, and other coffee stuff through the security gates. They hired me on the spot because I was one of the only crazy ones to wake up at 2am. The shuttle would come pick me and the other donut guards up at 3:30am (“Dusk Crew,” as one of the other workers called us), where we would work from 4-1pm everyday. In its black interior lit only by the dim fluorescent lights of the dashboard, me and the dusk crew drifted through the night; I felt it was a spaceship transporting us through the patient universe.
Despite abiding by the same clock a ghoul would, I didn’t mind the time or the destructive sleep schedule. In a way, I enjoyed it. Life hits differently at 3am. Things move slow in the lazy flow of time. It’s quiet. A black blanket hangs over everything, the sound is muffled, and the lights break through in gasps. The streets are empty; you can count the number of cars that pass by on one hand. Life at 3am is quiet, reflective. It feels like a long sigh that can only be released in that space of time.
Back then, 3am was a time for reflection and peace.
Whether I was up late studying in college, waking up for donuts in high school, or conquering the sleepover with my friends, 3am had always been a space I could loosen my shoulders; I could look out, see nothing but the black blanket, and feel the night’s odd comfort. The night and I would sigh in unison over this long space of silence.
Now when I wake before the sun, there are consequences. I consider drowsiness I’ll feel the next day. I think about what I have to do in the day ahead and what I didn’t get done the day before. My mind, more loose and restless than it was years ago, conjures up worst case scenarios like flashcards. I feel I can’t embark on the night like I once did, full of ignorance and wanderlust. Responsibility knocks on the back of my mind. It ties me down to the corners of my room.
It became clear to me the space of night I had called my own is no longer a spot I can just bask in. Even in college on the rare nights I did wake that early, or if I pulled an all nighter until the crack of dawn, there would be that part of me that enjoyed the silence and space I had stumbled on. As of late, it’s no longer the case. Where there was weightlessness in the long and beautiful dark bow of the sky, there’s now heaviness in the cracks and corners of the utter dark.
But how long would I let my mind win? How long would I accept defeat in the form of tossed covers and frustrated stares out the window? Not past 30 years old is a reasonable goal.
So when I woke for the third time, I decided I would take a stand. I wouldn’t let my haven of 3am be tainted by unprompted awakenings, nor would I let my current mind of restlessness dictate what the space has represented for me for so long. I wanted to preserve that time as my own. It was my space, damn it, and I decided to take it back from my own anxiety. Maybe I couldn’t fall back to sleep, but I’d try to accept the lack of slumber on good terms, as I once did.
I figured the way to my pillow was the same way to my heart: music.
“Inter” by Baths has been a song that comes on in flashes through my days. Occasionally I’ll be vibing with some work and it’ll pop up on my playlist, and I’ll always switch to the next song. It’s not that I don't like the song, but it never comes on at the right time. It is more lullaby-like; with its dark cover art and dreamy orchestral in a field of synths, falsettos, and space, it always struck me as an oddity in the daylight. It didn’t make sense at the wrong time; unless it was night, it was like watching a bat fly in the daylight. It just didn’t match its nature. In the quiet night and empty space of my room and my mind, I pressed play.
Over the gentle guitar thrums, defeated high-hats, and echoing incoherent falsettos, I reflected on the title “Inter.” As the last track of Baths’ album, “Inter” is short for interlude—an “intervening or interruptive period, space, or event,” according to Webster’s dictionary.
It’s the concept that in medias res, pauses occur; breaths caught; sighs met in the middle. Without these pauses, the event itself—whatever that may be—becomes stale. These interludes create space to breathe and become actualized.
In the deafening space of my own attempts at peace, I couldn’t help but wonder if I were fulfilling the idea of interlude. Then I couldn’t stop from wondering—a cycle I was too familiar with. I didn’t want to fall further in the depths of myself, so I embraced interlude and Inter: I stopped wondering; I relaxed and let go of the sigh built up; the chords played, and I embraced the space I had occupied once before by letting go.
For the first time in a long time with an empty mind, I looked back at all the other moments like this one, and I could see what the space was in actuality: an interlude for the indefinite space before me.
[Cover photo by Biel Morro via Unsplash]
LISTEN:
inter — baths
Jonah Thedorff is a (somewhat) recent graduate from the University of California, Berkeley. His literary experience is composed of two self-published two books, winning a writing contest, and contributing to Vocal and Medium under the surname Equals. He enjoys writing about the arts, culture, and anything that peaks his fancy. In his free time, you can catch him re-watching a Studio Ghibli movie, running for a 5k, or running from a bear.