What keeps you up at night?
It's a momentary glimmer of distraction. The tiniest notion of reminiscent thought that wanders off into wondering, the spark that lights a tinderbox of fixation. And now it is irreversible. The flame has caught. You're wide awake.
Maybe it's that one urgent question you meant to ask someone years ago but didn't. Someone that slipped through the cracks in your history, and they're too far gone now anyway. All the ghost ships that have sailed and sailed away, but at this hour, they've anchored in your harbor. They sit with flags waving, bright and beautiful. And it's almost likе it's real.
Sometimes sleep is as еvasive as happiness. Isn't it mystifying how quickly we vacillate between self love and loathing at this hour? One moment, your life looks like a night sky of gleaming stars. The next, the fog has descended. Suddenly you're in the town you left behind all those years ago. The trees of your youth with the phantom memory echoes of your belly laughter, and the rope indentations of your old tire swing still on the branch. All the phone numbers you still know by heart but never call anymore. The boy's devastated face as he peeled out of your driveway. The family man he is now.
What must they all think of you.
Why can't you sleep? Maybe you lie awake in the aftershock of falling headlong into a connection that feels like some surreal cataclysmic event. Like spontaneous combustion, or seeing snow falling on a tropical beach. A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of a wave.
Or was tonight the night you realized how solitary, how alone you really are, no matter how high you climb. The elevation just makes it colder.
Some midnights, you're out and you're buzzing with electric current — an adventurer in pursuit of rapturous thrill. Music blaring from speakers and the reckless intimacy of dancing with strangers. Something in this shadowy room to make you feel shiny again. On these nights, you know that there are facets of you that only glow in the dark.
Why are you still up at this hour? Because you're cosplaying vengeance fantasies, where the bad bad man is hauled away in handcuffs and you get to watch it happen. You laugh into the mirror with a red wine snarl. You look positively deranged.
Maybe you were trying to mastermind matters of the heart again. You've gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it's obvious. From you.
We lie awake in love and in fear and in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren't — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake. This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching. Hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve...we'll meet ourselves.
See you there. Midnight sharp.
Taylor
