In Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes“, he repeatedly refers to 3am as “the midnight of the soul”.
I think about that line a lot, and the concept really gels with the porousness you described in this essay. It’s like a spiritual liminal space, where the good and bad have fuzzed out enough that it becomes hard to tell one from the other.
I have a small, mundane occurrence in my life that happens at around 10 pm, but always feels like 3 am. It is often a party but so often excruciating. I never know which it will be and it is often both, when it really should be neither. It should be nothing. I typed some of it up but it’s a bit...wordy and vulnerable. Nevertheless, this essay made me feel a lot of things and put context to something in my life I did not know needed this context.
"Three am is far more often a lonely realization or a sickening crisis than it is a sweaty and infatuated party; these are the three ams into which it feels more likely that we might re-emerge." -- this part!! I think I very much want to fantasize and believe in the shot girl bacchanalia that exists in all of our dreams, but we are coming out of/still existing in so much trauma. I saw a few friends this past weekend, and had been eager to reconnect and resume in-person friendship and connection and excise the loneliness of the past year, to move past it, only to realize their visions aren't the same. They want to keep their head down and focused on working and saving... and it reinforced the realization that lives in my periphery of how we live now being irrevocable in many ways
Here comes a multiple crossover comment. I am embarrassed about how much I like Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do because it makes me think about day drinking, which is a bad habit I hang onto and day drinking at a bar is 3am at noon because, you know, “We are drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday”.
In Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes“, he repeatedly refers to 3am as “the midnight of the soul”.
I think about that line a lot, and the concept really gels with the porousness you described in this essay. It’s like a spiritual liminal space, where the good and bad have fuzzed out enough that it becomes hard to tell one from the other.
Anyway, great job, Helena.
I have a small, mundane occurrence in my life that happens at around 10 pm, but always feels like 3 am. It is often a party but so often excruciating. I never know which it will be and it is often both, when it really should be neither. It should be nothing. I typed some of it up but it’s a bit...wordy and vulnerable. Nevertheless, this essay made me feel a lot of things and put context to something in my life I did not know needed this context.
"Three am is far more often a lonely realization or a sickening crisis than it is a sweaty and infatuated party; these are the three ams into which it feels more likely that we might re-emerge." -- this part!! I think I very much want to fantasize and believe in the shot girl bacchanalia that exists in all of our dreams, but we are coming out of/still existing in so much trauma. I saw a few friends this past weekend, and had been eager to reconnect and resume in-person friendship and connection and excise the loneliness of the past year, to move past it, only to realize their visions aren't the same. They want to keep their head down and focused on working and saving... and it reinforced the realization that lives in my periphery of how we live now being irrevocable in many ways
Here comes a multiple crossover comment. I am embarrassed about how much I like Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do because it makes me think about day drinking, which is a bad habit I hang onto and day drinking at a bar is 3am at noon because, you know, “We are drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday”.