Dawn

I have a love-hate relationship with dawn.

On the one hand I hate waking up. I hate leaving my dreams, the warm cozy comfort of my bed, the freedom from responsibility. When I am tired I hate it even more, it hurts. I have a thousand memories of waking up tired, sleep deprived, painfully thirsting for just a few more moments of that precious, delicious sleep. No drug could be better, no love sweeter than sleeping. I thus associate early morning with pain, deprivation, a half-dead stupor that hangs on you like a wet blanket.

Yet I also love it: the birds just beginning to chirp, while the dark of night is no longer complete, neither has the sun declared the day begun.

Dawn is an intimate stolen moment I share with the world: just me and it, no one else is around to notice. Quick! enjoy it before someone sees us. The quiet and tranquility is not yet broken by the business of the day, I'm still free of the day's worries, blissfully unaware of its problems and stresses.

Dawn is the naive promise of a new start, a fresh beginning, yet unsullied by the grit of reality: work, bills, traffic. Dawn is a young person's innocent belief in true love, untempered by the reality of the difficulty and strain of living together, raising kids, noticing your lover's flaws. Dawn is the hope that it isn't too late for any of us, that as long as we breathe we can do whatever we want. Dawn is the wonderful illusion of free-will, before we discover our freedom to be that we have at the wheel of a car in heavy traffic. Dawn is the promise of immortality before we discover life to be terminal.

Dawn is the end of one beautiful thing and the beginning of another, still pure, beautiful, hopeful.

I love dawn.