Four in the Morning

There's a particular quality to 4am that nobody tells you about. It's not dark, exactly. It's the absence of anything happening. The house has stopped ticking. Even the fridge has given up. I'm on the sofa because the bed has become a place I go to fail. That's how my daughter's therapist friend put it once, at a barbecue, when I'd made the mistake of mentioning it. "The bed becomes associated with failure." She was right, which was annoying, and I've been on the sofa since. Two years. It started when I retired, which everyone says is a coincidence and I know isn't. Forty years of getting up at half five for the depot and then one day, nothing, and my body just kept the half five and lost the rest. Now I'm asleep by ten and awake by two and there's this long stretch, this landing, that I don't know what to do with. What I do with it, mostly, is think. That's the problem. The thinking at 4am is not the same as the thinking at 4pm. At 4pm I'm a reasonable man who's had a decent life. At 4am I'm an inventory of everything I got wrong. My brother, who I haven't spoken to since 2011 and who I'm not going to call because at 4am I'm certain he wouldn't pick up. The redundancy I handled badly in 1998. A thing I said to my wife the year before she died that I'd give a lot to have not said. I've tried the things. The apps with the man's voice telling me to notice my toes. The tea. The book. I've tried the radio, the World Service, which helps a bit, because there's something about a woman in Delhi talking about grain prices at 4am that makes your own life feel manageably small. Lately I've been doing something else. I'm not recommending it. I write it down. Not a diary. Just the thing I'm stuck on, one line, on the back of an envelope. "Brother." "1998." "The thing I said." And then I put the envelope on the table and I look at it, and it's a word on an envelope, and it's smaller than it was in my head.

Tonight's envelope says "Brother." It's been saying that a lot. The light's starting. It comes in grey through the blinds first, then the birds start, one at a time, like they're being switched on. I'll make a coffee at half five out of habit. I'll go for my walk at seven. I'll have a decent day, most likely, a 4pm sort of day. And tomorrow night I'll be back here, on the sofa, with the fridge switched off and the envelope, and I'm not going to pretend that's fine. It's not fine. But it's known. There's a difference, and at sixty-one I've stopped expecting more than known. I might ring him. Not at 4am. Maybe at 4pm, on a day I feel like the reasonable man. I've written that on the envelope too, on the other side. "4pm."