Three in the Morning

For a long stretch of my career I used to wake at three in the morning.

Never the big things. The big things you can deal with in daylight.

It is Tuesday’s meeting. The sentence you should have said differently, and the one you said instead. The pat on the back that would have cost nothing and never came.

So you lie there running it again, exactly as it happened, arguing your case to nobody. An hour of it, some nights more.

By seven you are up and fine. Shower, coffee, first call, and by the time anyone sees you there is nothing to see.

I did that for years and assumed it was simply what the job cost.

It is not a crisis and it is not stress. It is everything you did not get to say during the day, coming back at the only hour nobody needs anything from you.

Most of it only needs saying once, out loud, to someone who is not going to judge a word of it.