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My upstairs neighbor runs the shower at six fifteen every morning, and I know this because for a while I set my alarm to beat it, to get maybe forty minutes of a building that hadn’t started making noise yet. I don’t think I could explain to most people why that mattered to me. It sounds like a small, almost paranoid preference. But there’s something about a quiet that hasn’t been touched yet that I’ve never been able to get any other way.
I’m not a morning person in the way people mean when they say that with pride, like it’s an achievement. I don’t wake up energized. I wake up slightly confused and a little sad in a way that has no cause and passes within minutes. But I’ve learned that the confusion and the sadness are more bearable, almost pleasant, when there’s no sound of traffic yet, no texts lighting up my phone, nothing asking anything of me.
What the silence lets me do
I sit at the small table by the window with tea I don’t drink much of, and I look at my hands before I look at my face. That’s new for me, actually, looking at my hands first. They’ve started to look like my mother’s hands, which used to upset me and now mostly just interests me, the way genetics turns out to be less a metaphor and more a literal thing happening to your knuckles.
Eventually I do get to my face, and in this particular light, low and a bit gray, I can see things I miss under the bathroom’s overhead bulb. A faint line between my brows that shows up only when I’m not making any expression at all, which feels like it should mean something but probably doesn’t. I don’t rush toward fixing what I see. I mostly just catalog it, the way you’d note the weather.
I think I like this hour because nobody, including me, expects anything from my face yet.
The cream that isn’t about the cream
I use a plain, unscented moisturizer that I’ve had for months, the kind of product nobody would ask me about because there’s nothing distinctive about it. I like that. On busier mornings I resent how ordinary it is, wish it did more, felt more luxurious. In this early hour, though, the plainness works in its favor. It doesn’t demand attention. It lets the quiet stay the main event.
Some mornings I catch myself moving my hands in slow circles long after the moisturizer has absorbed, just because stopping means the next part of the day starts, and I’m not ready. I used to think that reluctance was about avoiding responsibilities. Now I think it might be simpler than that. I think I just like being a person nobody has met yet that day.
Where this gets complicated
I’m aware this whole practice depends on circumstances that won’t last. I don’t have kids yet. My schedule, chaotic as it can be, doesn’t currently answer to anyone else’s mornings. I don’t know what this ritual becomes when that changes, and I try not to get too attached to it precisely because of that uncertainty. My sister has two children and she’s told me, more than once, that the version of quiet I’m describing sounds to her like fiction.
I believe her. I also can’t quite let go of the hour myself, not yet, because it’s given me something I didn’t know I needed until I had it: a version of my own face that isn’t being observed by anyone, including, for a few minutes, myself.
What the hour costs me
I’m aware that waking early to get this hour means I’m often tired by mid-afternoon, dragging through the part of the day when most people are hitting their stride. I’ve weighed whether the trade is worth it more times than I can count, and I still don’t have a settled answer. On weeks when work is heavy, I sometimes let the alarm slide back to six thirty, and I always notice the difference, not in how I look but in how unfamiliar my own face feels to me by the time I actually sit down and look at it. It’s a strange kind of homesickness, missing a version of the morning I could have had.
My mother used to get up early too, though for different reasons, mostly to get through housework before anyone else needed anything from her. I didn’t understand it as a child, resented the sound of her moving through the kitchen while I was still half asleep. Now I wonder if she was chasing some version of what I chase, a stretch of time where she wasn’t yet anyone’s mother, just a woman standing at a counter in the gray light, her own face still entirely her own.
What I haven’t resolved
I don’t know if I’m using this early quiet well or just using it. There’s a difference, I think, between rest and avoidance, and some mornings I honestly can’t tell which one I’m doing when I sit at that table for longer than I meant to. The tea goes cold. The light shifts from gray to something with more yellow in it. Eventually the shower upstairs turns on, right on schedule, and that’s usually my sign that the hour is over, whether or not I’ve figured anything out.
Most days I haven’t. I’ve just sat there, touched my own face like it belonged to someone I was getting reacquainted with, and let the apartment stay quiet a little longer before the rest of the world woke up and started asking things of both of us.
