At 2:00 AM, the world forgets itself. The cars have stopped their sensitive alarms. The fan hums a song no one’s listening to. My phone screen glares like an accusation, and the moon looks like she’s pretending not to stare.
This is the hour when sanity clocks out. When your thoughts throw a rave in your skull and you didn’t even RSVP.
I could sleep, sure, but my brain is currently auditioning for Les Misérables and refuses to be told “no”. There’s something sacred about this hour. Unholy, maybe. Like the curtain between worlds gets thin enough to see your own ghosts waving at you from across the bed.
The day belongs to the functioning; those who answer emails on time, say “I’m fine” and mean it, hydrate. But the night? The night belongs to us; the poets and the madmen, the ones who overthink their overthinking until it turns into something almost beautiful.
I like to think the universe keeps her diary open right now. Pages fluttering, ink half-dry, whispering secrets to anyone foolish enough to stay awake.
The city’s heartbeat slows, but mine speeds up. Everything feels louder in the dark: your pulse, your regrets, that one text you never sent. The fridge hums louder than your dignity. The shadows gossip about all the things you tried to bury in daylight.
The silence isn’t really silence. It’s a kind of static. Like the world holding its breath to see what you’ll do next.
And maybe that’s why I never sleep. Because I’m scared of missing it; the symphony of stillness, the orchestra of chaos. The way night smells like second chances and unfinished sentences.
In this hour, I am a confession in human form. A monologue no one asked to hear. A glittering disaster with wi-fi access.
And you, fellow night creature, don’t lie — you’re here too. Watching your own thoughts pace the room in circles. Wondering if sleep is overrated or if you’ve just romanticised your insomnia beyond salvation.
But in this stillness, there’s comfort. The kind that whispers, “It’s okay. You’re not the only one awake.” The day may belong to reason. But the night? The night is ours.
The night as a kingdom.
Let’s be honest: the sun is a snitch. Too bright, too honest, exposes everything you’re not ready to face. The night, though? She’s soft power. She’s velvet authority. She’s the kind of ruler who’ll let you cry in her lap and pretend not to notice.
When the lights go out, so do the rules. No timetables, no deadlines, no small talk about the weather. Just pure, lawless existence. The kingdom of the unfiltered.
Here everyone is equal. The insomniac CEO and the broke poet both scroll through their existential dread under the same glow of 1% battery. The night doesn’t care about your LinkedIn headline. It just asks: what hurts? what dreams? what if?
It’s funny how the dark gets such a bad rep. “Scary”, they call it. But the daylight is far more terrifying, if you ask me. The day demands performance. You have to be composed, moisturised, employable. The night lets you ugly cry in your oldest T-shirt while eating bread straight from the packet. Liberation, my love.
In this kingdom, the poets write their rebellions in lowercase. The madmen crown themselves with static and call it enlightenment. There are no borders here, no visas, no gatekeeping. If your mind hums too loud for sleep, congratulations, you’ve been knighted.
Sometimes I like to imagine the moon as a nosy queen, holding court over all her night children. The streetlights her loyal guards, the stars her gossiping handmaidens. We’re her favourite sinners.
The night doesn’t demand sanity. It rewards surrender.
And maybe that’s why artists are drawn to it like moths to a questionable life decision. The dark hides your shaking hands but amplifies your voice. You can say the things daylight forbids. You can whisper “I miss them” or “I’m not okay” or “what if I never get there?” and the night will hum back, same, babe.
Daylight wants answers. The night is content with questions. It’s the ultimate soft launch for your truest self. All shadows, no filter. You, unshaven and unhinged, but somehow divine. And it’s funny, isn’t it, how in this so-called darkness, everything finally feels clear. Because in this kingdom, the currency is emotion, the anthem is chaos, and the crown jewel is vulnerability.
You don’t have to make sense here. You just have to feel.
The night won’t fix you, no. But she’ll hold you while you break. She’ll whisper poetry into your panic, hum lullabies into your logic, and hand you a pen when your heart starts to ache too loud.
Because in her kingdom, being a mess is just another form of majesty.
The poets: architects of the unsaid.
If the night is a kingdom, the poets are its unpaid civil engineers. They’re out here drafting blueprints for emotions no one asked them to build. Every sigh, every almost-text, every heartbreak they swore they were fine about — turned into architecture. Crumbling cathedrals of confession.
The day tries to keep them civilised, but by midnight they’re feral again. Language becomes a living thing, clawing to get out. They’re halfway through a Google Doc and crying about a comma.
Poets are the ones who over-analyse punctuation like it’s a romantic partner. They believe in the Oxford comma more than in true love. They see metaphors in burnt toast, plot twists in eye contact, tragedies in Spotify shuffle.
They don’t sleep because they’re too busy naming things. Loneliness becomes a character. Anxiety gets dialogue. Love becomes a limited-edition product that sells out before shipping.
They build bridges out of sentences. Between sanity and surrender. Between “I’m fine” and “I’m falling apart.”
And they do it with flair — dramatic sighs included. Every stanza is a tantrum dressed in velvet. Every poem a tiny act of rebellion saying, “You can’t silence me, not even at 4 AM when my neighbours think I’ve lost it.” It’s ridiculous and holy all at once. One line can ruin them. One rhyme can resurrect them.
Poets are emotional hoarders with better fonts. They keep heartbreaks in folders, neatly tagged for reference. They revisit old wounds like tourists in their own trauma. Ah yes, the breakup of 2023, still under renovation.
But here’s the thing: they don’t write because they want to. They write because the silence inside their skull gets too loud otherwise. Because the feelings don’t evaporate; they ferment. They sit by the window, candle flickering, convincing themselves it’s “a vibe” and not a cry for help. And yet, out of this chaos comes beauty. Because somehow, when they translate pain into words, it becomes bearable. Pretty, even. Their notebooks are half-confession, half-crime scene. But, God, they make it art.
Maybe that’s what poetry really is: the audacity to look at your own wreckage and say, “Fine. I’ll make it rhyme.”
So they do. Over and over again.
They write until the words stop hurting.
They bleed ink, not because it heals, but because it feels honest.
And in that honesty, something sacred happens.
The night leans in, amused, and whispers: “Welcome home, architect.”
The madmen: dancers on the edge.
Ah, and then there are the madmen. The ones who look at gravity and say, “Cute concept.”
They are chaos incarnate. Walking contradictions with sleepless eyes and dangerous thoughts. They don’t simply live through the night; they perform it. Barefoot. In metaphorical fire. Wearing the crown of “I swear I’m okay” like it’s high fashion.
While poets translate pain, the madmen embody it. They’re the ones pacing rooms, arguing with ghosts of ideas that won’t shut up. The kind of people who text you “you awake?” at 3:11 AM because they’ve just realised the futility of human existence and that they might’ve left the gas on.
They don’t need coffee. They are coffee. Boiling, bitter, and a little addictive. Every thought they have feels like an emergency. Every feeling demands choreography. Their madness is momentum. Society calls them unstable. The night calls them kin.
The madmen are inventors of meaning. They find patterns where there are none, laugh at the absurdity of control, and dance along the fault lines of their own minds. They see the universe not as linear but as a mood swing. One second they’re declaring love for humanity, the next they’re googling “how to live in a forest alone without taxes.”
And yet, there’s genius in that mania. In their unfiltered thinking, the truth always slips out. They see the cracks in reality where art sneaks in. The madman is the raw version of the poet: no editing, no metaphor, just explosion.
They don’t need to find meaning. They become it.
You can spot them by the look in their eyes, that slightly wild glint that says they’ve made peace with their contradictions. They know life is absurd, and that’s why they take it seriously. They wear their madness like a badge, not a burden. It’s not insanity; it’s intensity turned up too loud for daylight to handle.
If the day demands composure, the madmen offer combustion. And yes, sometimes it burns them. The same spark that lights the masterpiece also sets the artist ablaze. But they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Because to be sane in a world this strange? That’s the real madness.
So they keep spinning: word-drunk, heart-broken, beautifully deranged, in a waltz only the night understands. And when dawn finally creeps in, smug and fluorescent, they grin through the wreckage and whisper: “See you tonight.”
Night as mirror, night as mercy.
By 4 AM, the drama dies down. The caffeine crash hits. The group chat’s silent. Even the chaos in your brain has curled up for a nap. And what’s left is this strange, heavy hush. The kind that doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t demand productivity, just… exists.
This is when the night holds up a mirror. Not the kind that flatters. The kind that remembers. Every scar, every almost, every thing you swore you’d healed from but still hums quietly under your ribs.
The dark has a way of making honesty look seductive. Under the soft glare of the streetlight, you can finally look at yourself and not flinch. The night doesn’t need you to be composed. She doesn’t clap when you perform sanity. She claps when you’re real.
You could tell her anything and she’d just nod.
“I miss them.”
“I hate myself sometimes.”
“I wish I could start over.”
And she’d say, “Of course you do, love. Everyone does.”
The night is merciful like that. She’s not your therapist — she’s your accomplice. She lets you spiral in peace. She lets you cry without witnesses. She lets you take off your bravado and sit with the version of yourself you hide from daylight.
In her presence, shame feels small. Regret feels softer. Even heartbreak hums instead of screams. It’s almost maternal, isn’t it? The way she tucks you in her darkness and says, “There’s nothing wrong with being human.” And you believe her. Because in the dark, everyone’s the same: a tangle of nerves and dreams and almosts.
The day wants neatness. The night is fine with the mess.
Sometimes mercy looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like a shadow that doesn’t ask to be explained. And maybe that’s why I trust the night more than I trust people. She’s the only one who’s seen me completely undone and never turned the lights on.
The day heals by distraction. The night heals by confrontation. Both work, I suppose. But one feels truer.
Because when the night holds you, she doesn’t say “move on.” She says, “stay.”
Stay, and look.
Stay, and forgive.
Stay, and remember that breaking isn’t always the opposite of becoming.
The intimacy of insomnia.
Insomnia is a relationship. A toxic one. It keeps texting “you up?” and you keep answering. Every. Damn. Time.
It starts innocently: one more episode, one more scroll, one more thought. And suddenly you’re emotionally married to 3:00 AM. But there’s something painfully intimate about it, isn’t there? You, your heartbeat, your half-baked epiphanies. The city sleeps and you’re in a long-term situationship with your thoughts.
The bed becomes an interrogation room. The ceiling a blank screen playing reruns of everything you regret. You make eye contact with your reflection at 3:33 AM and it’s like, oh, it’s you again.
Insomnia is the thief that never steals quietly. It takes your rest but leaves behind strange gifts: an idea, a poem, a playlist, a sudden clarity about something that won’t make sense by morning.
Sometimes it’s torture. Sometimes it’s communion. You start to think the stars are alive, blinking, winking, gossiping. You start naming constellations after people who left. And god, the drama of it. You lying there like the tragic protagonist of your own indie film. You whispering to no one, “I just think too much.” You lighting a candle at 4 AM because apparently this is self-care now.
But here’s the secret: insomnia has range. It can be cruel, yes, but it can also be creative. It cracks open the mind in ways daylight can’t. The same sleeplessness that breaks you also births the words you needed. Some of the best ideas arrive wearing pyjamas and panic.
It’s an intimacy no one really talks about; the way your own mind becomes both villain and companion. The way you start laughing at nothing. The way the night starts feeling like a friend who’s bad for you but knows all your secrets.
And when the first hint of sunrise creeps in, you feel that bittersweet mix of relief and mourning. Because morning means pretending again. Morning means performance.
You turn off the lamp, whisper “same time tomorrow?” And the night, smug and knowing, whispers back: “You’ll be here.”
Creation as chaos: the dance between beauty and breakdown.
Creating at night feels like summoning. You’re not writing, you’re conducting an exorcism with better vocabulary. You sit there, trembling, half-possessed by an idea that doesn’t care you have class in five hours. The room goes quiet, your thoughts go loud, and suddenly the world is nothing but you and the blinking cursor, doing a slow tango of destruction and discovery.
It’s madness, really. But a gorgeous one. Art isn’t born from stability; it’s born from the cracks, from the moment your emotions get so loud they start rhyming. You try to call it “creative process,” but deep down you know it’s spiritual combustion disguised as productivity.
There’s this rush, right before the words land. Like something is clawing its way out of your chest. You’re terrified and euphoric, and you can’t tell if you’re making art or having a breakdown. Both, probably.
Because creation is chaos. The poem only exists because you couldn’t shut up. The song only happens because silence hurt too much. The painting, the script, the playlist, all of it is just your pain dressed in aesthetics. But that’s the trick: the world calls it madness; you call it art. You bleed prettily. You cry in Arial. You rename your disintegration as a draft.
Every artist is a little bit of a liar and a little bit of a God.
They take the unbearable and make it wearable. They bottle storms, label them “conceptual pieces,” and hang them on walls. The night knows this. That’s why she feeds you ideas at inconvenient hours. She’s testing how far you’ll go to birth something beautiful out of your insomnia.
And you always take the bait. Because when the chaos hums, you answer.
Maybe that’s the real madness: this compulsion to make meaning out of ache. To polish your pain until it glows. To keep dancing even when your feet are bleeding, because the rhythm won’t stop.
Creation and breakdown are siblings. They share a room, steal each other’s clothes, and both sneak out after midnight. And if you’re lucky, when the dust settles, the world gets a masterpiece.
And you get… peace? No. You get a brief, shimmering silence before the next storm starts writing itself.
The sacred loneliness.
There’s a holiness to solitude that no one warns you about. The kind that doesn’t feel like punishment, but like prayer. When everyone else has gone to sleep, and it’s just you and your heartbeat pretending to be a drumline, something shifts. The loneliness stops being sharp. It becomes tender. It becomes sacred.
You stop running from it and start sitting with it, legs crossed, tea in hand, like two old friends catching up. You tell it how the day went. It tells you who you really are. Because here’s the truth no one says out loud: being alone isn’t the same as being lonely. Being alone at night is agency. It’s choosing to exist without the noise. It’s remembering that your own company can be enough.
In that quiet, you realise you don’t need constant connection; you just need presence. The stars are enough witnesses. The moon, the only audience that doesn’t interrupt. Sometimes you sit in the dark and it hits you how alive you are. You haven’t fixed anything. You haven’t figured anything out. You’re still a bit of a mess. But you’re here. Breathing. Glowing faintly in the dark like a candle that refuses to die out.
There’s something divine in that small defiance. The sacred loneliness teaches you stillness. It shows you that silence isn’t absence; it’s depth. That peace doesn’t always roar; sometimes it sighs. And when you start finding comfort in your own echo, you’ve won. You’ve made peace with the most unpredictable person in your life: yourself.
The night applauds quietly. She knows you’ve levelled up. Because loneliness that doesn’t break you? That’s strength dressed as stillness.
So you sit there, a poet with tired eyes and (un)holy thoughts, smiling at nothing, realising that this is what growth actually looks like: not fireworks, but flickers. Not applause, but breath.
And you whisper, to no one and everyone: “I think I’m finally okay being alone.”
Rebellion against sanity.
Sanity is overrated. It’s beige. Predictable. The emotional equivalent of plain toast. Meanwhile, madness? Madness wears sequins and smells like smoke. Madness is poetry in motion and caffeine in bloodstream.
The world wants you well-behaved, well-slept, well-adjusted… boring. It tells you to tuck your emotions into acceptable boxes, smile like you’re fine, and call that “balance.” But the poets and the madmen? We were never meant to be balanced. We were meant to tilt gloriously.
Because the night isn’t about being sane. It’s about being alive.
There’s rebellion in staying up to write instead of sleeping. There’s protest in choosing art over routine. When you scribble a line that makes your chest ache, when you paint with trembling hands, when you scream-sing into your pillow; that’s not chaos. That’s resistance.
You’re rejecting the dullness of survival in favour of the drama of being. Sanity tells you to keep it together. Madness tells you to fall apart creatively. And oh, what a joy it is to do just that; to lose your composure but keep your rhythm, to let your feelings spill and call it a sonnet. The night becomes your accomplice, your therapist, your co-conspirator in emotional rebellion.
Because being “mad” isn’t a weakness. It’s a declaration: I feel everything and I refuse to apologise for it.
The poets and the madmen share this creed. We don’t heal neatly. We don’t move on quietly. We howl our heartbreaks into verses and make tragedy trend. We write letters to our ghosts, kiss them on the cheek, and send them back to memory with postage unpaid.
We know the world doesn’t need more sanity. It needs more softness. More soul. More people unafraid to feel until it hurts and laugh until it heals. To live wildly is an act of rebellion in a culture obsessed with composure.
So let them call you dramatic.
Let them roll their eyes when you romanticise the rain.
Let them say you’re too much.
Because too much means alive. It means unedited, unfiltered, unwilling to be normalised into numbness.
And that? That’s the real revolution.
The poets and the madmen are just the brave ones who dared to turn their breakdowns into ballads, who danced barefoot in their grief and made it look like art. Maybe we’re all a little insane for believing beauty can save us.
But until the sun rises, we’ll keep writing. Keep feeling. Keep rebelling.
Because madness, darling, is just passion with nowhere to go.
The night is ours.
And when the clock hits some unholy hour and the world softens into static, there we are: wide awake, unholy, unhealed, unstoppable. We don’t need applause. The moon already claps for us. The streetlights nod knowingly. The air itself hums with the poetry of what we haven’t said yet.
There’s this quiet electricity to the late hours, this soft agreement between time and soul: we belong here.
You, the dreamer with messy hair and too many browser tabs.
You, the one who texts your friends philosophical thoughts at 2:11 AM.
You, who feels too deeply and jokes too loudly to hide it.
This is your hour. Your kingdom. Your sanctuary.
Because the night doesn’t belong to those who sleep soundly. It belongs to the ones who wrestle with their own minds and still choose to make art out of it. The ones who cry, and then write about crying, and then laugh because the writing made them cry again.
The night is for the people who feel; not faintly, but ferociously.
It’s for the poets who use metaphors like oxygen. For the madmen who mistake heartbreak for fuel. For the ones who chase meaning through the labyrinth of their thoughts until sunrise finds them victorious or delirious, whichever comes first.
We, the nightfolk, are not lost. We’re just lit differently.
There’s a reason the stars shine brighter in the dark; it’s the only way to see them. Maybe that’s us, too. Maybe our madness is just how we sparkle when the world stops watching. So when morning comes and the sunlight tries to erase your intensity, don’t shrink. You’ve been forged in midnight. You’ve spoken with shadows. You’ve danced with your demons and come out glittery.
Let the world keep its rules and routines.
Let them call you restless.
Let them say you overthink, overworry, overfeel.
Because the truth is, the night doesn’t ask you to be less. It asks you to be honest. And honesty, raw, messy, luminous honesty, is the most beautiful thing a human can be.
So here’s to us, the sleepless romantics, the unhinged artists, the tender-hearted fools. Here’s to every tear turned into ink, every ache turned into art. Here’s to the poets and the madmen, forever holding hands under a sky that understands us.
The sun will rise soon. But for now, the night is ours.
Here at Her Campus at MUJ, we hold space for the poets and the madmen, the ones who feel too much and refuse to apologise for it. Written in the quiet chaos of the night, by Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, for everyone who ever found clarity in the dark.