I go to bed while it is still tonight

I am going to bed while it is still tonight rather than already tomorrow. The house is doing its late quiet. I am going to keep doing this, because the version of me that shows up tomorrow is being decided right now, in this specific fifteen minutes, and not at any point tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning I only get to work with what I am given here.

The lamp is off and the street is doing very little. Tomorrow is still a long way off from here, which is precisely the point of getting in this early. There is a book I did not open and I am completely fine about it. The house has that particular settled sound it makes when everything in it has finished for the day.

I stay up for the hours nobody wants from me, and then pay for them with a version of myself that everybody has to deal with. That is a bad exchange rate and I have been running it for years without once writing it down. The late hours feel like the only ones that are genuinely mine, which is exactly why I defend them so badly. I am not resting in them. I am taking a loan against tomorrow and calling it freedom, and the interest on it gets paid by other people who did not agree to the terms.

The evening is not being stolen from me. I am spending it, and the moment I could see it that way I was able to choose differently without feeling deprived of anything at all. That single reframe did more work than any amount of resolve ever managed. Tiredness does not arrive announcing itself as tiredness. It arrives as impatience, as a shorter fuse, as decisions I would not otherwise make, and I hand all of that to the people around me and then call it a bad day, as though it had come from nowhere. The cost of this never lands on me alone, and that is the part that finally moved me.

So I set an alarm for bedtime, not just for the morning. One alarm, at the hour I keep sailing straight past without noticing that I have. The alarm is not a rule I am imposing on myself and it is not a punishment. It is information, arriving at the one moment I am reliably not tracking the time on my own.

In bed, on purpose, while it is still tonight. Tomorrow gets a better me.