The Five A.M. Alarm

One of my favorite things in the world is to sleep in–especially after daylight savings time schedules my mornings in darkness.

There’s something wrong about leaving a nice, warm bed, when everyone else is asleep and quiet.

And yet, when my silent alarm goes off at five a.m., vibrating against my wrist, I reluctantly slide out of bed, toes curling as they touch the cold floor.

I pad down the hall to the living room, one of my cats at my heels, and grab my laptop, waking it from its electronic slumber and plucking my story threads from the previous night. Yawning and wincing in the harsh artificial light, my cat settles against my legs to go back to sleep. I start tapping away.

My stolen hour is gone before I know it. The real alarm, the “go to work” alarm, sounds stridently from the bedroom and I hear my husband stumble into the bathroom.

Is it worth it? Is it worth losing that precious hour of sleep snuggled up to my loved one just to type out a few more words?

I ask myself that a lot…at night.

The question of whether it’s worth getting up at five a.m. is never on my mind in the early morning hours. My conscious brain is still half asleep as I type up new worlds, but my subconscious, which has been planning and plotting all night, is eager to push the story out through my fingertips, to get that one more sentence on the page.

And that’s why I get up to that silent five a.m. alarm.

Because I want to know what my subconscious has been cooking up all night.

Because I want to know how the story turns out, too.

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Aidee Ladnier

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