I often have trouble sleeping.

When insomnia hits I lie supine and resigned until darkness graduates into morning. Sometimes I manage to settle into a shallow place only to float back up a few hours later, vaguely troubled.

Six months ago I left a rewarding job, a seven-year relationship, half of my social circle. I’d planned to leave more in short order: friends, apartment, San Francisco, the country. I was going to board a one-way flight out on the last day of the year with a backpack and little else, but due to an unexpected series of events, I chose to remain.

I’m enjoying it immensely but, organic and deliberate as my decision to stay and work has been, doubts besiege. Alternate universes cast accusatory shadows. The choices to be considered seem endless and stultifyingly many when you’re alone. Each subsequent decision is long-worn with poring over, but reveal upticks in intonation and sprout sly questionmarks’ tails as I chase sleep. Shift gears? Pursue a different kind of ambition? Eschew motherhood? Lease not buy? Nest not fly?

Et cetera.

These are followed by a bunch of shouldn’t-yous, queued up like a flock of antisheep. Every friend and neighbor seems to be having a kid, for instance. In fact, their second! Second children, second dogs, second mortgages, fancier titles and higher salaries commensurate with increased experience and responsibilities... It all looks so shiny and secure, better, as a thing does when you’re not of it.

I ask myself: am I doing the right thing?

Intellect rolls her eyes: right is made, not predestined.

Irritable and sleepless, I reply: yes, yes.

Then I push aside the covers and get up to wander about the night house.

Four years ago this house chose me.

My partner and I’d been looking to move into a place together for about six months. We’d been repeatedly disappointed by hyperbolic Craigslistings where tantalizing phrases like cozy metropolitan oasis invariably translated to overpriced shithole of a rat-infested studio with no kitchen.

It was an inordinately sunny day in late October when we headed to the umpteenth open house. As we climbed the stairs leading up to the apartment, I remember noting with distaste the dubiously stained plush carpet. We walked in with little enthusiasm.

The space immediately opened up to us, preternaturally familiar. It was broad and airy despite the throng of interested parties inside. It had blue-gray walls with white trim, a fireplace, hardwood floors. There were multiple bedrooms and baths, a garage, extra storage. Sun streamed in through huge south-facing windows, and rental applications were already stacked up to a precarious height on the knee wall between the living and dining rooms.

The sliding door to the back deck was wide open, so we stepped out and leaned over the wood-glass railing to look down on a backyard two stories below. A huge palm tree rose up with fronds like green-orange fire, accenting a sweeping view of Twin Peaks and the Bay. It was miraculously within budget.

We looked at each other and said, “This is it.”

To our surprise, we ended up getting it. When we asked her why she chose us, the landlord shrugged and said: I liked how how you organized your rental application. Also, cute picture of you guys on the title page!

What is a home?

It shields you from storms, fears, unknowns. It’s a constant. All other things change; a home just reveals itself over time.

The partner is now an amicable vestige of a recent past, and I have all this space to myself.

The truth is, I love being a sole occupant. Mild guilt about excess notwithstanding, I’m protective about preserving my newfound privacy. I feel an intense pleasure in returning to an undisturbed space, every time. It’s like a small and separate universe just for me, with its own chronometer, stopping when I leave, starting up again when I return.

The landlord warns me that she’ll sell the place, or move in herself, “any time now.” She’s annoyed by the increasing gap between market value and what I’m paying. I perversely wish for the other shoe to indeed drop, and soon. I love new adventures and shouldering the rent solo abbreviates my runway. But I’m having a hard time leaving voluntarily.

A home gives you time, and rooms of your own.

I like having a stretch of three to five consecutive hours to work, and late at night there are no appointments or meetings to get in the way of that. Stores are closed. There’s no reason to go outside at all. There’s no fear of missing out, no obligations. No feeling of racing against a clock, no anxiety over a checklist of errands. The night is an infinite expanse, and I luxuriate. I relax and focus.

In a series of lectures at women’s colleges in 1928, Virginia Woolf spoke about the importance of good food, warmth, and comfort for productivity and general well-being. She posited that these, “by degrees [light], half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

The night house is where I am most myself.

When I wake up in the middle of the night anguishing over impermanence and insecurity (I’m behind, what is it that makes me happy, what am I working toward, why is it so difficult to embrace process over ends?), the night house surrounds me with the steadfastness of its walls.

I’m well-aware that they confine as well as they protect.

I’ve never understood the meaning of home, and of choice, more than I do now.

When I wander around the lightless house with my Panasonic GF1, there’s only the sound of my bare feet and the susurrus of my robe. I move through what I imagine the depths of a blue-black sea to feel like.

I’ve long prepared myself for departure: involuntary, inclement, ignoble even. As a result, the space has become steeped in a kind of preëmptive nostalgia. It makes me want to commemorate it, to express my love and appreciation for it and who I am when I’m here before the sudden goodbye must come. I don’t want to be caught by surprise.

I take photographs with long exposures atop a makeshift tripod of books and a bar stool. I capture a red-dregged wine glass on the table, the stillness of my closet, the regal regiment of booze bottles in the dry bar which doubles as my home office. I snap outside moments from the inside: the gibbous moon, rogue lights on the hill. Everything that I think I want to remember about this more-than-a-place, during my most inward hours while everyone else is dead to knowing.

It calms me, and I’m happy to make use of time that would have been wasted on bed-bound listlessness.

The house, on the other side of the lens, is graceful and easy. The photograph is a relationship, and I know that the house sees me. The railing, erstwhile-chain-smoking, binge-soup-making me, the prostrate-in-sickness, nightcap-loving me. The me of white silk and red Napoleon Perdis lipstick with upswept hair unkempt mid-Sunday afternoon eating peanut butter out of the jar, just because. It has effortlessly and always adapted to accommodate me along an unpredictably forged continuum.

My home is my confidant and co-conspirator.

I’m not a true night owl, much in the sense that I’m not a full-on introvert, but I feel at home at either ends of these spectrums. I imagine that the terminals of all lines must meet somewhere, sometime: the farthest points closest neighbors, day at the cusp of night, dark deepest next to light.

Did you know that there are flowers that bloom after the sun goes down? They call them vespertine.

The idea of blossoms flourishing in darkness moves me, a lot. It seems so contrary; defiant even, despite the apparent fragility. It’s about, too, being rather than being seen. The thought of unconventional birth, process, and ensuing triumph — metamorphosis of the most aspirational kind — is inspiring.

It’s now well past two in the morning. The fireplace is a penumbral maw. The four-person wooden table in the dining room: a shelter for shadows. Knives glisten on the magnetic strip in the galley kitchen next to the gas range and two-tone wall tiles. Mirrored doors face distant hills through windows, making the living room an extension of a mysterious moonlit landscape, long shadows on the hardwood disappearing under an autumnal rug. The white bookcase glows. The succulents on its shelves sleep.

I shoot 422 photographs in the silence of six nights.

I don’t know much about this house except that it was built after the turn of the last century, and that I have to myself a little over 1500 square feet of solitude protected from urban bedlam and ballyhoo. (The thought of a gleeful mitochondrion comes to mind, with a membrane that shields, and keeps baddies out, warmth and “myness,” in.)

Some mornings and afternoons, I try to simulate the night house: I turn off the phone, sign out from email and social media, quiet all alarms. Still, signs that I’m not alone insist and interrupt. There’s a flat under mine, and beneath that, an in-law next to the garage. I’m friendly with my neighbors but all of us keep mainly to ourselves. Even though we try to respectfully guard our lives from each other, there’s bleed-over, primarily by way of sound. A neighbor’s vacuum roars over the most frenzied movements of Paganini’s Caprices or the furor of Evgeny Kissin playing the Moonlight Sonata. A colicky infant fills in the pauses. The postman rings. Birds chirrup outside, saying day! and every few hours hunger strikes. Light illuminates and calls to attention that errant strand of hair on my sleeve, the nagging dust bunny in the far corner of the room, a hawk in flight at the corner of my eye on the other side of the glass.

In contrast, solitude and silence simply settle in at night to stay. Distractions retreat and only I remain. The night obscures, and what can be seen in darkness can be made into stories of my own choosing, soft-edged and half-lost already, ripe for retelling.

Sometimes it feels like the day is a long exercise in waiting. I go to a nearby cafe in the early mornings to write. I return. I go to the gym and the farmer’s market. I lunch with a friend. I return. I put away the groceries. I plug away on the loose ends of projects. I sit and read, or mull over ideas, taking notes window-side. At some point I go over to the north end of the flat to turn the thermostat up as a chill creeps in. The residual warmth of day seeps out of the house’s seams. As I return to the living room, I pause in one of the open doorways at the nexus of the flat to admire the evening glow that floods its south side. Behind me the bedrooms overlook a drowsy street, and darken. The night house finally converges.

The photos I take here feel like many things. My contribution to a conversation, reflections in a looking glass, secrets, things I didn’t know about myself. I want to remember everything there is to remember about the magical time that this place is witness to: youth, health, strength, beauty, being in love.

The night house frames these things and brings them into relief.

I used to dance tango socially, often coming home with my Argentinian músico at five in the morning from all-night milongas. We would talk about putting black paper over the windows to stop the day from happening, then do our best by pulling down the shades, turning our backs to the light, pouring each other another glass of wine.

But day always breaks, birds heralding the end to the night house even before the sky starts to brighten. They sound the signal to get some shut-eye.

I survey what I’ve accomplished then. No matter how much I’ve produced, I usually feel pretty good. I almost always feel good after hours of making things, especially if I’ve made enough for a beginning or a middle.

I clear away my favorite shot glass, now emptied of calvados, and maybe an ice cream spoon, along with paper clippings, rotary cutters, the camera. I cap the pen, close the laptop. I let down my hair.

An unknown person once said that the ideal body of work is done in a single breath, in a single night, and that “the sleep that follows is eternal.”

By this time I’m totally wired, or finally tired. Both, maybe. Yes, yes.

So I reluctantly get up and return to bed.