Two Versions of Six

It is six in the morning, and I have not slept. There are two versions of this hour, and they are not the same hour at all. There is the six o'clock you arrive at from below — the one that comes up under you after you have lain down at one and slept the deep first sleep and surfaced into a kind of brightness you did not earn. And there is the six o'clock you arrive at from above, the one you have been sliding toward all night with a book on your knee, the kettle going through its second go, the lamp on the kitchen counter doing the same patient work it was doing at midnight. From the outside these two hours look identical — same light coming up the wall, same first bird, same blue — and yet from the inside they are different rooms.

I am in the second one. The kind of awake that has not been interrupted by sleep, that has only thinned out, gradually, the way the dark thins, in patches. There is a particular quality to a body that has not slept: not tired exactly, not yet; something closer to translucent. You become easier to read. The face you wear is the face you would wear if no one were watching, because at this hour no one is. The city outside has not started its day; it has only stopped, briefly, between two of them. The seam shows.

I think I prefer this hour to almost any other — the pretense is gone from it. No one is performing anything yet. The cars on the road are honest in a way they will not be by eight, and the lamps that are still on are still on because they were left, not because they are being decided about. You can write at this hour without straining; the page meets you halfway.

But I will pay for it later. I always do — by three this afternoon I will be the version of me that does not get to come back, the kind that lies down for forty minutes in a chair without quite sleeping. I know this and I do it anyway; there are some hours you trade other hours for, and this is one of them.