Sunrise

On most days it doesn't matter how early you set your alarm clock or how long you stay up into the wee hours of the night. Most days it just doesn't matter, because either way there just isn't a sunrise. The sun might rise and dawn come in faded shades of grays and blues, tinting the world in murky watercolor washes, but there are no true sunrises on these days.

It is not like in the movies, where the two lovers share a kiss in the sun's first Technicolor rays as some soft spoken bird twitters pleasantly in the background. Most days the world starts nothing like in the movies. The birds are louder for one thing and much more annoying.

Yet sometimes on a good day, unexpected and unprepared, it can be even better. The world explodes into color, the sky on fire with it and casting a rosy glow over everything while anything that grows becomes a livid green in contrast. The sun will peek, just over the horizon like a nervous bride, slowly rising full and ripe in the sky. But only sometimes, when the dust in the air catches just the right light and no one is paying quite enough attention.

Then it just fades, the sun somehow growing brighter and smaller all in the same breath as it rises out of the morning haze. It becomes too bright, too clear, too sharp, every little flaw defined and spotlighted.

So everyone waits for the sun to set and for more flattering light to cast its glow. Yet sunsets are so different from the exquisite beauty of a true sunrise, more common and cheapened somehow by their frequency. Anyone can watch a sunset, Apollo's chariot crashing headlong into the horizon in a fiery, ephemeral blaze, yet it takes patience to catch a sunrise unaware.

And I will catch them all, each day waiting in the predawn light like a war-bride widow on the cool night roof outside my window. I wait for the sun to break open the world and expose me bare for the fraud I am before I crawl back through the window to wrap myself in the empty warmth of my quitted sheets. For I do not wait each morning for the sun, but for the faint chance that the sandman might grant me sleep. I will wait so patiently each and every day, catching each sunrise to pass the time away. Most days filled with only fading washes of grays and blues, while sometimes a bit of fire will break through. Each day's sun rising anew, yet I can not see them as separate anymore since days hold no meaning to an insomniac.

This morning is no different. It is a blue morning like the last one was and the one before that and the one before that and so on and so forth so long I can't count them on my fingers and toes any longer. I can hardly remember the last true sunrise, but that is a lie since I remember them all to make up for the dreams I no longer dream. Across the way my neighbor's house is blue and still like the rest of my world. Everyone else is sleeping.

About a week ago a girl I thought could be a friend came over and waited for the sun with me, but she was disappointed with the results. She wanted the Technicolor movie version, not this lack there of sunrise I have grown so use to. The blues were too still for her and the grays too dull. I should have warned her or apologize, but I didn't do either. She never would have stayed up the whole night if I told her the truth beforehand nor did I think it right to apologize for the sun. So I crawled back through my window to make a pot of coffee for the both of us. She was asleep before I could get the coffee maker out from under my sink. I let her lie and didn't bother with the coffee at all, it's not like I need the caffeine anyway.

We haven't talked all that much since then, a few phone calls to pretend to plan a lunch date when things get less hectic at work. But it won't really matter if we get lunch or not, because we will never be the same together. I bothered to let her in and show her the pieces of me that no one ever gets to see and she feel asleep. She didn't realize that the sunrise meant something and I'm not going to tell her otherwise. She was the first and probably last person I'll ever tell about sunrises. Next time someone needs to stay the night before they have to head back to the city, I'll just put in a movie.