It was lovely, it was awful.

I do not know when or how I turned so nocturnal but the trappings came early. I started pushing 1am long before I was out of school and by the time college came around, 3am had become the norm. Being employed caused a lapse in the sleep pattern but not for long. Currently I am pushing 5am everyday and even then, I have to talk myself to sleep. Waking up late comes with its set of pangs but I feel like I am rarely able to be of much use during the day. It's too bright, it's too noisy, the mind cannot latch onto a single focal point.

At night I'm a better version of myself. I start to look better, the anecdotes seem to assume colour, the punch lines come easier and the cogs suddenly loose and fall out and the wheels begin to whirr with soothing steadyness. At night I always feel closer to the person I imagine I'm trying to be.

And yet the nights are always much too short, the half hours pass feverishly and before I know it daytime has begun to make itself known. In those moments when it begins to get light again, the feeling is strangely calming. To know you're privy to the experience of the night jerkily making its way out as daylight replaces it irreverently. But there is also panic. A sense of futility, the world suddenly seeming like one big inside joke that try as you might, you just can't get. They'll reference purpose and meaning and 5 year plans and discipline with self-congratulatory smiles and all you're thinking is 'Christ, any minute now, the punchline." It doesn't come and you call it a day.