Just before the sun comes up

My favorite time of day

[Jump to this week’s song on repeat.]

Today’s the longest day of the year and it seems appropriate that

Madeleine Dore

’s daytime season post has been rattling around in my brain. In it, she reflects on a period of her life when she spent her days mostly biding her time until night. She talks about a gradual transition away from this in favor of what she calls a “daytime season.” She writes:

A daytime season can be one that orientates our social life and our hobbies, but it can also be more figurative—it can be a season of letting the light in, of anticipation, of delighting in whatever the day brings.

Photo by Grant McIver on Unsplash

There’s no good or bad here, no better or worse. It’s all necessary. But people, like plants and animals, thrive in different environments — where the extremity and duration of the seasons vary. We all have different nourishment requirements. So, as I emerge from a period of hibernation, I’m thinking about what my own daylight season might look like.

I love early mornings, before anyone else is up. I think of the bakery I worked at in high school. Scoring the bread before sliding it into the ovens and prepping trays of donuts while I waited to slide the bread back out, steaming and golden and smelling like heaven. I cherished the quiet darkness of the store — no customers, no music — just me and the room to commune with my unwieldy teen emotions.

I think of riding my bike, in college, through the streets of Chicago to get to my opening shifts at the cafe. It was always so quiet except for the sound of my wheels on the concrete and the occasional bus. It felt like a secret, that a city of that size could be so still. I especially loved that ride the morning after a rain, the streets still shining. I always watched for the moment when the street lights turned off, the sky gradually lightening.

Or I think of sitting at a stop light on the north end of the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee on my way to the studio at 5am. I would watch for signs of other early risers — the occasional light switching on, far above me, in the office buildings and condos that stood opposite the dark expanse of Lake Michigan — invisible, but very much present — before the light turned green and I went on my way. I always listened to the weirdos on this drive, our affectionate name for the 91.7 WMSE djs. You never knew what you were gonna get with them (I remember one time it was just audio of cars racing across the salt flats) but whatever it was, it always contributed to the feeling that I had briefly slipped outside the stream of time and place.

Sometimes — my favorite times — there was something a little eerie, a little spooky, a little portentous about these mornings, like something was about to happen. No one on the streets, everything dark, and when a breeze kicked up the air felt electric.

I like being in empty places that are meant to be busy. I like the ceremony of preparation, the anticipation without the pressure. It’s such a brief window, even an hour later and everything’s different.

I know lots of people feel similarly about late nights and the way you can ride the wave of thrumming energy all the way through; the magic, hushed feeling of the world around you settling into slumber. I used to feel this way myself. I remember wandering the empty city streets with friends, when all we wanted was to wring a little more life out of the day. The world felt big and so did we.

But finding that pre-dawn awe from the late-night end always came at a price, for me anyway. When I first read this piece by Nina MacLaughlin in The Paris Review, I remember a wave of nausea rolling over me, it felt so familiar: 

And then dawn shows up like a cop, like an angry neighbor, like death itself, and the clock starts ticking again. The damp cold come down begins, a new day wrecked from the start. The mouth is dry and sour. All you want to do is eat, or else that is the last thing in this world you want to do…If you’ve been up all night, you know that there is a divide between people who’ve seen the whole of the night and those who have slept through it. It is as though, for a time, they are two different species. When it got to be tomorrow, we’d watch the first people walking down the sidewalk on their way to work. Freshly showered, cereal eaten, minty mouthed, wearing clothes they’d put on just an hour before. There is no communication between these two species. Each knows something the other does not.

(You should really read the whole piece and the series it’s part of, it’s fantastic.)

Sometimes when Ben and I tell each other stories from before we met, we sound like completely different people. Or at least I do. I was a creature of the night, and creature feels like the right word for it. Reckless, brazen, stupid, desperate. (All said with love.) Sometimes I miss that creature and the way I would give myself over completely to the night, just the experience of it. But mostly I feel relief and a sense of thank god I don’t have to do that again. I know this isn’t anything special, but it feels special when it’s you and yours, doesn’t it?

A crucial part of the morning routine now — the snugg.

The transition from one way of life to another is confusing — a constant contradiction and discomfort — but it’s also one of moving with instinct and moving toward ease. And sometimes you get to reconnect with people from the before times, having both emerged, at once strange and familiar, blinking at each other in this new light. Oh, it’s you. What a tender, heart-full-to-bursting moment that is.

So I’m in my daylight season…or maybe not quite. The thing is — and let’s really get literal with this — I don’t like too much daylight. In Salt Lake City, I found the endless sun and blue skies oppressive, depressing. The sun comes out and I scurry for the shadows, frantically looking for my SPF as I start sweating. We’ve experienced more rain in our 2 months in the Pacific Northwest than we did in our full 3 years in Utah. Maybe it’s in my genetic coding, but a gray sky and air that’s thick with mist is so much more inviting.

So, I don’t know if I’m a full daylight creature either. I think I’m most at home in the in-between, the murky transitory times. All I’ve ever wanted were answers, reassurance, and the comfort of certainty, though I’ve never been able to find any of that. But I’ve also always been drawn to mystery and ambiguity, drawn to the moments of held breath and prickling skin. And I know how to appreciate a slow and quiet dawn, before the question of what will the day bring has been answered. It’s my favorite time of day.

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This week’s song on repeat

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*electric guitar solo*