There is a specific quality to four in the morning that doesn’t exist at any other hour. Not the darkness, not the quiet. Something else — a particular aloneness that arrives when the rest of the world has surrendered to sleep and you are the only person awake in your own life, sitting with things that have no name and nowhere to go.
I became an expert on four a.m. that April.
The pattern was always the same. I’d wake — from a dream, from nothing, from my wife turning over beside me — and within seconds it was there. Not arriving gradually. Already present, as if it had been waiting just below the surface for consciousness to return and let it in.
Grief. Fear. Regret. Anger. Not in sequence — all at once, from every direction, no order and no mercy. A million angles of attack and nowhere to stand.
I know how to detach. I built that ability deliberately, over decades, starting very young. I know how to watch pain from a distance and stay functional while everything falls apart. At four a.m. that April, it was useless. The detachment that had carried me through everything simply stopped working, and there was nothing between me and all of it.
The small space we were living in seemed to shrink at those hours, the walls coming in, the need to be somewhere the pain couldn’t follow becoming overwhelming. But there was nowhere to go — and, the part that made it bottomless, no one to go to. Only my wife knew, which meant that even if I’d woken the whole household, I couldn’t have said a word of it to any of them. And my wife was deep in her own devastation; this was not a weight she could help me carry at four in the morning. So I held it alone. I put the words down somewhere, because somewhere was better than nowhere, and I waited it out until the feeling ran out of fuel.
I wrote three things in my diary that week, within days of each other.
I just want the pain to stop.
I need help — even if it’s just a counsellor to talk to.
I choose happiness this time.
All three are true. All three are the same person, at four in the morning, in a small room, holding on while the city went on outside and everyone she loved slept.
She held on every single night. After everything she’d already carried, holding on at four a.m. was just one more thing she did because someone had to.
I choose happiness this time. Even then. Even at a million angles. Even at four in the morning.
