6:30 a.m. much too early a start today after another sleepless night: iPod buds like tiny clamshells sealing shut my ears as I slowly unfurled myself into the cold black deep where the fish were all peculiar in their own right, and blind, and quietly minded their own affairs.

Music an electric light through my veins. (I phosphoresce like a struck match.)

Cats' eyes blinking an indifferent green blaze, unexpected headlights like a BBC deepwater scientist hollowing out the alley, alarm clock rolling over another red minute.

Sometimes, on days like this, I turn on the bedside lamp before the alarm even goes off, and sitting outside the circumference of that hot yellow halo, I cry on the side in the dark for awhile. I do this in secret. I do it as an indulgence, a luxury. I do it to steam myself open again, like a sealed letter, the same way I take a long hot bath.

I read and work too long over coffee, and then there's an absurd flurry of towels and clothes and shoes flung about the room. Illegible and anxious. They make no sense.

But outside, I was surprised by snow . . . cold white spritz of it effervescing against my too-flushed cheeks, glittering my hair, bringing me back.

Tonight, I will sit inside a warm, softly-neoned room and listen to jazz . . . the street and snow and everything outside the window backdropping the musicians a blurry charcoaled penumbra, saxophone an incoherent rush of heat and metal and sound, and really, at the end of the day, this is more than enough, and what could be better than that?

A.H., what a touching way of describing the pain of arising unwilling into waking life like a daily (re)birth.

I can truly relate these kinds of mornings. ;)