I hadn’t meant to spend the night reading, but that’s what I did, reading punctuated with a phone call and then another phone call, reading punctuated with the smiles I could hear in the voices over the line. I hope they heard mine, too.

I guess I’ve settled in. I’m in the process of, as they say, settling down. And it’s a far cry from the voice memos I listened through recently, the reminders of a searching soul. Maybe it’s the years of memorizing and performing monologues that comes through when I need to stand outside myself to look at myself. Maybe it’s the need to say aloud, quietly and under the cover of darkness, what I would scream into broad daylight if I were braver.

But maybe that’s defeatist.

Maybe I record my thoughts only late at night because the day brings the active work to forget them. Maybe it’s because at night, when the mind is tired, I let down my guard and speak to what’s buried somewhere in there. There’s hope during the day, hope demonstrated by the fact that the voice memos are time-stamped very, very late.

---

Many years ago, during a particularly turbulent time, I found myself recording voice memos at night when I couldn’t sleep, which was often. The voice memos, most of which I saved simply as “Night”, range from around 20 seconds to nearly 8 minutes, the pitch of my voice swinging between whispers and the scratchiness of unrealized tears. Until recently, I never went back to listen, and I recently listened through only the most recent because of the significance of the dates. Sometimes I want to shake my younger self back to her senses and other times I want to wrap her in a hug. Looking at those dates reminds me how quickly something can change.

I’ve returned to that habit only sparingly, having gotten a bit of a grip on my place in the world and learned to have hard conversations instead of imagining them. What is striking is not that I almost always fall asleep from either exhaustion or relief once my words are out of my system, freeing me from mulling them over, but rather that my hesitancy of going back over these thoughts is quite like the way I don’t read over old journals, except when looking to corroborate something I think I remember. It’s not quite an aversion, but I stay relatively removed.

And I’m not sure why that’s the case. A fear, maybe, of hearing, in daylight, what I don’t want to acknowledge, or maybe embarrassment at the melodrama of lying awake. It’s interesting to notice, and I was not at all surprised when I quieted swirling thoughts recently by recording my first voice memo in a good couple years.

But then I did something differently. I wrote down the thoughts, too. And I said them out loud. And the thoughts became a conversation, and the conversation reached a conclusion, and the vortex stopped swirling. It’s different when the whole thing plays out in real time and not just in my head. It’s a whole rather than parts.

And it means that a solitary night reading is nothing more than exactly that.