It seems like it’s getting darker every morning when I wake up instead of lighter. I imagine it’s just because of the rain clouds that are stapled over California this winter, but it feels like we’ve started revolving the other way, tilting away from the sun and back into winter.
I woke up once in the dark this morning to tend to Luke. The clock on Shawn’s bedside table said 5:30. I put my son back to bed and collapsed in the rocking chair until his breathing evened out again. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck and just didn’t quite remember it. It’s like that sometimes. I guess it’s being wrenched out of the wrong part of my sleep cycle. I sat in the rocking chair with my cold feet tucked up under me thinking of how little sleep I had left before the alarm would go off.
I detoured to the bathroom on the way back to bed. There’s a binary clock in our bathroom whose brilliant light serves as a nightlight as well as a timekeeping device. The binary display fries your brain at first, not to mention confusing the hell out of the house guests, but once you get used to it, it’s quite easy to read. I only have to glance at it now.
And I did glance at it. The hours and minutes that go by in darkness are such a precious resource that I can’t help but count them. The display was not putting out nearly enough light to justify the hour before dawn (even a dark dawn). I blinked and stared again. 1:00 and nothing more.
Did my magic fairy godmother decide that I looked like hell and needed another six hours of sleep before I could reasonably be expected to interface with others of my species, or were my powers of perception so skewed on first waking with a lurch to crying child that I read something like 12:45 plus change as 5:30?
More likely the latter, but I won’t rule out the former. I’ll take all the help I can get.
Perception in the dark hours of the night is something else entirely. I tend to wake with a jolt no matter when I’m roused and in those seconds before the framework that corrals my life slides into place, I find myself staring at common place objects with no idea of what their purpose or function is. It leaves me wondering if any two people really see the world as the same place, like if the color I see and recognize as green really looks the same in someone else’s head. At least, these are the things that run through my head in the grayscale landscape of my kid’s bedroom as some undisclosed hour of the night.
Some time later I rolled back into my own bed, the alarm clock in perfect agreement with the bathroom now. One o’clock and all is well. Shawn didn’t wake, but his fingers twined through mine and I was out what seemed like seconds.
Perception, though.