There’s something stunning about early morning, before the sun rises and the frost on the grass has had time to evaporate.  It’s quiet except for the wind.  Even the nocturnals seem to be in a warm spot, refusing disturbance.  Yet, through the stillness and bitter cold that cuts through the body immediately, it is this time of day that I miss, that makes me feel so alive. I should feel alone without the sound of someone, something scurrying about the leaves or among their homes.  It’s a Saturday morning to sleep in before coffee with lots of sugar, thank you.  It’s a new day though it feels like the end to an unhappy day.  So it is true: every ending is a beginning. I ran up my sidewalk for refuge out of the wind.  My mind was growing numb along with my ears.  When I stopped suddenly, it could have been for a noise in the bushes or a light moving down the road; movement ceased when I thought about how, what I feared was mutating into something I couldn’t recognize.  Recognition is key with most issues but when that element is gone, we consider ourselves normal…  Should I mention that things change? It was once the fear of the exposure.  Ripping layer upon layer away and finding nothing in the center but a sad shape of the one I think I remembered fondness of.  It was easy, simple, non-destructive.  Now, it’s something completely different.  I can hear it in my own voice.  And they’re all false: the mumblings, phrases, and incoherent grumbles are lies.  It has penetrated much deeper. I can stand up and consider myself light as a feather, daring to give myself even the slightest wind but through that, I’m knocked off the roof like a stone heavy in myself. It’s an odd stance.  The incapability to not be vulnerable and yet completely careless all the same.  As though I hold the grenade and the pin, the dynamite and match, the hearth and nothing. The opposite of love is apathy. How did I get to this point of feeling absolutely everything and becoming so insanely reckless with it all?  It was, until recently, the opposite and I despised it.  Now I don’t know if this newness that I’m dealing with is any better.  The truth is, I suck at people.  I’m great at meetings but very bad with keeping things going.  I meet people I want to be friends with to push them away.  ”I’m through,” I tell myself.  A year ago, it was the stone truth.  I was over it.  I didn’t care one way or the other, contact or none.  It’s now that I try to renounce those words and rather, it’s me who I’m through with.  So I start forgetting my wallet, my bag, my shoes…  In the span on 3 minutes. And I get drunk and take silly photos with people I don’t know and will never meet again.  It’s not them I’m through with but me. This isn’t meant to be some melodramatic drunken rant of how I’m really bad at keeping anything nice and pretty (I mean, have you seen my new car?).   This is supposed to be about how those darkest moments in which you think there isn’t anyone around to hear you scream or sympathize with the 20-something degree weather that you’re standing in, looking up to the stars to see if you can identify Orion’s Belt or the sisters, head bent way back, squinting against the light pollution of the city…  It supposed to be about in the moments when you least expect it, you find just what you’re looking for: a thought, a feeling, a house key to the warmth.   This was supposed to be a metaphor for how absolutely lucky I’ve realized I am at 5:32am on a Saturday morning. I’m alive and well.  Things are wonderful. And please, forgive my typos and grammar slurs for the many glasses of whiskey still has a warm grip on me.  It’s now 5:55am and I think it’s finally bedtime.