If you’ve ever done the kind of drugs that take you to the ceiling rather than the floor, you know what it’s like to hate the break of day. This sort of activity comes at a price. Never mind the money you handed at barstool level to the guy with no last name sitting next to you. That was just a deposit. The real bill, the one you owe for trying to make the most of your 3 am comes due with the realization that 3 am does not last forever. Morning is here and now you’re fucked.

Perhaps it’s just my own experience, but this unwelcome dawn seldom appears as a vampire-killing, blinding ray of sunshine. Rather, it creeps in as a faint glow in the overcast night sky and slowly gets brighter from there. It’s easy enough to turn away and ignore it for a bit, but that won’t last. The drugs are wearing off and reality you thought you murdered was never really dead.

And when reality does return, it holds a nasty grudge. If you need to function on some level, you’ll need to keep enough of your drugs in reserve to make through work, school, jury duty, or what have you. There won’t be enough to get high, but maybe enough to get by. And if you have the foresight and maturity to save your drug bender for the weekend, you’ll have the luxury of spending the next day in bed, unable to sleep and unable to do much else. This will give you plenty of time to swear off this behavior with a resolve that is white hot in intensity, but never seems to last very long.

Those days are behind me, likely for good, but I’m still the same person deep down. There are times when I crave those little nooks and crannies of existence where the annoying things can’t get in. I just deal with it now without the help of a white-powder life coach.

I still do love the night though not with a goth’s dark romanticism or a nightclubber’s urge to dance and hook up. I just like it when the sun won’t make me squint and when there are fewer people around.

Because of my schedule, the slice of nighttime I claim is the part at the very end. During these winter months, I leave home at around 6:20 am when it’s dark outside. A half hour later when I board the bus to work, it’s still dark.

When the sun does come up, I’m so relaxed and pleasantly distracted it takes me a while to notice it. When I do, it’s no big deal. It feels much the same as sleeping in.

Now the days are getting longer and the sky is beginning to glow by the time I get down to the bus stop. Pretty soon it will be broadcast daylight. Pity that.

Oh well, there is always next winter.