I have stopped setting an alarm. The body keeps its own appointments — five-twelve, five-fourteen — and the windows are still black, with a kind of black that has its own listening to it.

The kettle is a small ceremony. Water meets element, and within the metal a faint clicking begins, like ice in a glass set down too softly to make a sound. I have come to love that clicking. It is the only thing in the kitchen that wants to be heard.

There is a chair I sit in. It belonged to someone, then to me, and now I do not know whose chair it is. I sit in it and do nothing for a while. Outside, a car passes — somebody early, somebody with a reason — and the sweep of headlights crosses the ceiling and is gone.

I read here. Whatever I am reading I read here, in this hour. Pages are slower at this time. Sentences arrive whole. Later, after the radiators wake up, and after the building begins its argument with the day, the same sentences will hurry past, and I will not catch what they meant.

It is not that I am better at this hour. It is that fewer things are.

When the kettle clicks off I sometimes do not pour. I let the chair hold me. I let the dark hold the room. The day is coming for both of us; we have a few more minutes.