Small-Hour Love

Last night, after a lovely Valentine's Day (and my mother's birthday as I've noted before), I woke up at 4:30am and couldn't get back to sleep. I tried my meditation, I read a poem on my Poetry Daily app (this one, it's great), I checked my email (thank you, Jason Schneiderman for giving me a great email to read at 4:30 in the morning), but nothing seemed to lull me back into the sweet black of sleep. So I thought. And I thought. 

I thought about the future, and what it is going to be like, I thought about money (because that's what we do at that hour), I thought about the dog's little rash on her chin, I thought about moving to California, I thought about staying in Kentucky, I thought about Lucas and his career, I thought about Cynthia, I thought about my grandparents, I thought about my brothers, and my nephew, I thought about my parents, I thought about my friends, I thought about the animals of my friends, I thought about my body, my health, my weight, my eyes, my teeth. I thought about the weather and the earth, I thought about the moon and the ocean, I thought about my novel, and I thought about poems,  and I thought about this new idea that I have which could be a play or maybe a young adult novel, or maybe nothing at all, and that's how I let the 2 hours pass. In the dark. With all those thoughts. This morning, a little worse for wear, I realized maybe I needed that. It was Valentine's Day after all, maybe what I was doing was just giving a little bit of love to all those things.Today, I don't want to call it "worry." I want it to be more like "attention." Maybe those things just needed attention. Maybe they needed a little early morning, small-hour love. And if you woke up from a dream wondering if someone was thinking of you, someone was. It was me.