On being a morning person

I am not sleeping much anymore.

The jetlag has me up late at night and early in the morning. Three hours of sleep, maybe four. It’s been like this for days.

The first time, I cursed my body. The second time, too. I wanted so badly to sleep! To stay in bed, just a little while longer. To linger peacefully. To close my eyes.

But my body wouldn’t have it. Awake from your slumber! it seemed to say, and I obliged. And after a few days, I am glad I did. It has made me remember that I am in fact, a morning person.

At six am on Saturday, the streets are so quiet the sounds of an occasional car passing by sounds more like an ocean wave raising and falling with the tide than a car zipping by. Time slows to a lazy, gentle summer sigh, and I compete only with the sparrows and crickets for the morning. The calm makes the sound of my pen gliding against the page seem monumental.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy being up while the rest of the city still sleeps. When I was younger I loved waking up before the rest of my family.

I was seven, maybe eight, and meticulous at an early age; I was so organized that my alarm, set unnecessarily early for six, needed ring only once before I dutifully climbed out of bed (literally, for I had the top bunk), and quickly changed into my uniform, which I had carefully set out the night before. (As if it would take me long to choose between the black stockings or the evergreen ones.) I did this in the dark, my sisters still sound asleep, before quietly descending down the creaky wooden steps of our centuries old carriage house. I knew every creak on every step by heart (I still do), and tip toed around them, shoes in hand, making my way down three floors in a little dance. (This made me exceptionally good at skipping cracks on the sidewalk to protect my mother’s back, and helped cement my legacy as ultimate Twister champion later on in life.) In the wintertime, the darkness made the journey all the more challenging, and I gave myself extra points for making it down without waking my parents.

Downstairs I would help myself to a bowl of cereal, turn on my favorite morning radio show, and eat quietly by myself at the kitchen table. I would sit and laugh with myself at the morning show’s jokes (years later I realized how few of these I must have actually understood since few were PG or age appropriate). One time, I called in for a contest and even made it on air. I was the only one awake to hear my radio debut. (I didn’t win, but it made my morning.) When I grew tired of jokes I only half understood, I would count the city buses going by, calculating the time till my parents woke by the frequency with which they came as daylight began to break. Mornings, for about an hour, were mine.

Soon the house would come alive as my sisters and parents awoke, padded footsteps vibrating through the house, and when the sound of the shower’s running water began I knew my father was up. My mother would leave for work while my sisters still slept, and despite my readiness (lunch packed and backpack waiting in the foyer), I knew that we would be late again. For once shared, the morning put on a new face: stressed, tense, fickle and hardly cooperative. Juices hurriedly placed in lunchbags spilled in backpacks; gym clothes were forgotten; hair was left dripping wet from the shower despite our parents’ concerns that we might catch cold in the frigid winter mornings. The radio station would be changed to something more serious — my parents hated the incessant chattering of my beloved talk show hosts— and the newspaper, whose headlines I had only skimmed while bringing it in (I was seven, after all), would be properly devoured by my parents.

Years later, my mind and body recall vividly how much those earlier mornings meant to me. Quiet, solitary, slow and still—these were the opposite of how my life seemed to be, and though I could not consciously articulate this as a child, I must have instinctively known this was so. I wouldn’t trade those mornings in for the world, but then of course, life happened, and I did.

Life happened, and growing up meant more responsibilities, responsibilities which seeped into my morning time. There were earlier classes in high school and half-hearted attempts at being a night owl in college like the rest of my friends. In graduate school, I knew I was unhappy when mornings became difficult. I had never before had trouble waking up in my life, but that year I found the snooze button on my alarm clock for the first time—and I hated it. I suppose this is why people drink coffee but I had never needed it before, and it was not a habit I particularly wanted to develop— certainly not for something I had no interest in waking up for. My morning struggles were telling: I quit my PhD program two years later after finishing my Masters. My grad school degrees still sit under my bed, wrapped in the Fedex tube they arrived in.

Later, though I grew happier professionally after joining a startup, a long commute made it impossible to claim back my mornings; they would be shared with sleep-walking, coffee-starved commuters instead. Breakfast would be consumed en route, makeup applied before a small hand mirror while fellow commuters did the same. Working in tech, I became glued to my iPhone; any morning calm I could have fostered was lost to vapid email-checking, despite my best intentions.

Today I am 12 hours jetlagged off a series of flights from Asia and my head aches from three hours of sleep, but my mind is abuzz and I remember what my mornings used to feel like. It is Saturday at my parents’ house, and my family still sleeps, so I take advantage of this quiet morning, bringing in the newspaper which has only just been delivered, just like before.

I listen, and the city is slow to move. It sleeps like a summer sloth resisting the day and deeply dreaming. I sit in my sweater, a rare moment of cool, fresh air before the day’s humidity begins. It will be here in an hour, and the chorus of cicadas will fade behind the morning traffic; the buses will start to run too often to sound like an ocean’s rhythmic wave against the shore.

But for right now, I am in second grade again, content with the quiet and the sound of my ballpoint pen hitting against this empty envelope, my makeshift journal for the day.

I write, and the morning belongs to me.