at night.

my apartment, late at night, is a place with which i'm not entirely familiar. i am a night person, but not a late night person - i am 12:45 a.m, not 3:30 am. during what most would consider "the middle of the night," i am usually asleep. i sleep lightly, and because of this i wake up intermittently, shuffle to the bathroom, wander back.

these moments of half wakefulness can yield interesting results. i have often just been roused from dreaming, and as i move through the bedroom doorway i rub my forehead and the bridge of my nose, trying to make sense of the nonsensical. trying to snatch out a bit of meaning from whatever bizarre scenario my subconscious was playing out, or sometimes, trying to stamp down some unruly emotion or memory my waking mind usually has the intelligence to forget. trying, in the few moments that i'm awake, to understand the previous sleep.

i usually fail on all counts.

the other night, i walked out of the bathroom around 4:30 am, readjusting my eyes to the darkness after a few moments of light. ususally, i just turn right, and then left, and then push the door, and then push it shut again without hesitation - with a bit of haste, in fact, because dark unseeable space is deeply unsettling to me. even though it is my apartment, and i can see the thick outline of the couches and bookshelves and dining room table, there are pockets of nothing between them that can't be penetrated. anything could be there. so i scurry past, not wanting to know.

but the other night, i slowed down. the other night, i looked, and everything was tinged blue. it was like the blue of a television set that's on in the dark, but the television was outside. it came through every window, it came from under the front door. it bounced off the walls, and the furniture, and tinted the floor.

i'm sure that there is an explanation for this. the hour of day, probably. (though it seemed too early for late winter light, this was like a precursor to light. light's harbinger.) and i didn't even ponder it for more than three seconds before i continued my scripted journey back to bed. but why did this, of all things, arrest my attention in my half-sleep? and why am i thinking about it now?

maybe because the very beginning of illumination, in that particular drowsy moment of my life, was a beautiful shade of blue. and it required nothing of me except to notice it.

i was asleep again in seconds.