The soft clacks of the keyboard are all I hear as I sip from my cup of water. The air around me is still and silent as my eyes stay glued to my laptop screen, my body folded into a strange sort of lotus position. I glance to the 24-hour clock on the screen and see the numbers: 23:56. My attention returns to lines of text on the screen and I promptly forget everything and everyone. This happens multiple times throughout the night, again and again, as the clock slowly ticks its way to morning. It isn’t until I spy the sky outside the window glowing a bright cobalt blue that I realize I’m screwed. Again.
I shut my laptop and turn off the light before burrowing under the covers, hoping to fall asleep as quickly as possible.
I’ve been a night owl for quite a while now. I don’t remember when it started, but I do remember that all I wanted to do was stay up later to have more time in the day to do what I wanted. I remember staying up until 12AM in the beginning and feeling so accomplished; I was tired, but so happy I got to read one more chapter in the novel I was obsessing over.
As I grew older, this steadily increased from 1AM, to 2AM, to 3, before I started sleeping at 5, 6, or 7 in the morning.
I would sleep when the sun came up and wake up a few hours before the sun set. That feeling of accomplishment was still there, the feeling of having cheated the god of time, of stealing extra hours to add to my day.
But a gnawing pit in my stomach grew with my sense of accomplishment because I had so few hours in the daylight.
My life became flipped, the polar opposite of all my friends and family’s lives. While I slept, they were living their lives, and while they slept, I was awake and alone. Despite what I originally felt, I wasn’t cheating time. I wasn’t stealing time from anyone except myself. Instead of gaining more time, I was losing time with my friends and family because of our difference in lifestyles. And yet, despite this realization, I am still as much of a night owl as I was before.
I’ve tried to wake earlier, to have those stolen moments in the early hours of the morning, but it wasn’t the same.
Maybe it’s a remnant of my teenage emo days, or maybe it’s just the night itself.
But unlike the lively, hopeful morning, the night makes me feel relaxed and contemplative. There’s a comfort and tranquility to the dark, glittering sky blanketing the world, a sense of universal quiet when most of the world is asleep and you are one of the sole few who are awake.
It’s only during the night when I feel that the flow of time seems to have stopped around me, leaving me with a small pause, a break in time, to do whatever I want. To indulge myself in my hobbies.
And so, despite needing to fix my sleeping schedule to function properly in society, I keep my hours and remain a night owl.
At the dead of the night, I am still found marathoning TV shows and reading my books, feeling the glee of “stealing” hours of freedom for myself. I still ignore the clock slowly ticking the hours towards a new day and the brightening sky as the sun rises.
And the next morning, when I wake up, eyes dry and squinting, head fuzzy, I don’t regret it at all.
I’m happy to remain a night owl.