I do love sleep, but we have trust issues.  Such a capricious and fickle lover, always promising to stay the night, but so often and so disappointingly disappearing in the wee small hours, just when needed the most.

Good thing there are several playlists for this kind of thing.  (I have playlists for nearly every occasion, after all.  For winter strandings and summer expeditions.  For flipping pancakes and nursing grudges and recovering from the flu.) I unlock my phone, put my headphones on, and listen to the ethereal sound of Renee Fleming’s unearthly soprano singing Björk’s “All is Full of Love”.

The moon is huge tonight but is mostly modestly veiled behind designer clouds.  The dog is sleeping on the rug (lucky dog), farting away, and dreaming of high-intensity running.  Chasing rabbits, perhaps, or wading into a marsh to retrieve a game bird.  Meanwhile, the violinist Hilary Hahn is performing Max Ernst’s “The Last Rose of Summer,” which melts into “Sour Times” by Portishead, and then Billie Holiday singing “Lonely in New York”.  All these pieces, music from such different times and places, but each with something to say about the hours before dawn.

Maybe inspired by my dog’s sleep-running, I put on my gear and go for an early morning jog.  There are benefits to insomnia: it’s not often you have the world to yourself.  Every second that passes at this hour of the day seems to carry a little extra heft and significance, as though it’s been dipped in something invisible but rich, and not quite weightless.  The lights are dim along the river trail, barely holding their own against the last hour of the night.  Even distant galaxies seem brighter.  Crossing a bridge, city lights are reflected on the water’s surface, like perhaps that’s just what the architects had in mind.

At first, I have my headphones over my ears, but then I silence my device and push them down to rest above my collarbone.  There is a time for music and a time for quiet, and it’s important to know which is which.  There must always be rests between the notes, spaces between the sounds; spaces that train whistles and passing night birds can travel through.  The wind in the treetops, the calling of geese, a passing jet, footfalls on gravel: the diegetic soundtrack of an ordinary, unrecorded moment.

As sleep-deprived thoughts often do, mine reel drunkenly about, before settling on a conversation, half-remembered and years ago.  A friend and myself, drinking green tea and eating egg rolls, talking about a multitude of things.  An unreturned text, a scrap of gossip, a strange coincidence, a long-ago journey, a minor betrayal, a disappearance, a wedding, a denial, a promise.

As I recall, every bit as important as the words we shared, though, were the comfortable silences between the stories.  A recognition at that moment that this is not like dead air on the radio, not some awkward absence.  It blooms between us like something to be regarded.  An ingenious paper flower expanding in water, not isolating but shared.

So, there I am, years later, running alone on that riverbank in the minutes before dawn.  I am listening to the east wind mingling with my breathing, and realizing what a pleasure it can be to hear and be heard.  What a privilege it is, to speak and to listen.