The Smallest Hours

In the smallest hours, when all else is asleep, things seem the biggest. Like a balloon wrestled from a hand by the wind, suddenly things of great height and consequence are possible. Extraordinary ideas and fantasies march through the brain and the body responds with clenching and scheming.

Action! Action! Action!

Sometimes the things that come in the smallest hours are phantoms pumped up and away from reality and spread over the peace of the night with claws and teeth bared. There is nothing you can do that is worth anything, they hiss into ears and dreams, everyone else is better, more accomplished, and you have failed again. The body begins to sweat. Your paper for tomorrow is crap. You will not pass the class. Hands grab hold of sheet’s edge as if waiting in a boat for the storm to break. Your interview will be a disaster. You will be jobless, friendless and wifeless. Eyelids flutter in the wasteland between asleep and awake and the shapes of towels hung to dry look like villains holding knives. You will eat too much and then you will not look fabulous and you will not surprise anyone at the high school reunion.

Awake finally, with brain washed clean by morning, the struggles and doubts from the night before color the day in washed out grey’s.

Sometimes it is different though. Sometimes something purer in nature takes hold of these smallest hours and alights them to fly unabated through sweet skies of possibility, creativity and productivity. Minds snap to thought smartly and in line. You are on your way now, this is what you’ve been trying to get at this whole time. Bodies cease to grow weary and eyelids remain light. You’ve worked for hours now, can you believe it? For hours and no rest. Toes tap happily on the floor beneath. I’ll be the walking dead tomorrow and I don’t care. I don’t care at all.

It is after that the mornings seem the best. The smallest hours gave license to the deepest and best fantasies, and even if in the daytime the scheming seems silly and impossible, distance was covered and progress was made. Extraordinary ideas and fantasies had marched through the brain and the had body responded with clenching and scheming.

Action! Action! Action!