What I love more than anything about the small hours of the morning is the way the clouds rest on the mountains. The sun is still sitting on the horizon. What’s the rush?
From my friend’s house, the mountains opposite split into a valley almost perfectly centered, exactly like in a painting. There are different kinds of trees there, but mostly cypresses. Every now and then you could see their tips poking through some lazy clouds.
Lazy clouds, lazy sun. If the early bird catches the worm, then it’s flying real slow.
Or maybe it’s an hour that belongs more to those who still haven’t gone to sleep. That laziness is a kind of softness for them. No one is asking them to start the day yet.
The light moves slowly across the sky, struggling to give the world its usual colours.
Actually, maybe it’s laziness.
Everything is simply slower in the morning.
That long stretch when you’ve just woken up, where you stretch until you look like the victim of some medieval torture device. That snooze button which, for reasons I still don’t understand, somehow contains the five best minutes of sleep of the entire night.
All those little moments are made of elastic seconds.
They stretch and stretch. Time moves slowly. The sun rises slowly. The clouds are still asleep.
That’s how I met her.
How I really met her.
That night, I was at a party that was going about as well as any party can go when it’s with work colleagues.
Around nine, she messaged me to say that she and two friends were heading to the bar.
I saw my chance and jumped on my bike.
I cycled across Hamburg like an Olympian, only to arrive, obviously, sweaty and red-faced.
Thankfully, it was one of those dimly lit German bars.
Around two in the morning, the U-Bahn stops running in Hamburg.
It was half past two.
I had my bike.
But we walked.
I walked her home, except she lived an ETERNITY away from where we were. Maybe an hour and a half on foot.
I don’t know by what kind of alchemy, but it took us five.
We walked, we talked, we smoked. Then we talked again. Then we smoked some more. Then we started all over.
Somewhere along that walk, we had shared intimate things. Moments of vulnerability, rage, betrayal, and love.
We laughed, we yelled, often both at the same time.
And five hours later, we were standing outside her place.
The clouds were still asleep.
The sun was struggling on the horizon. Apparently even Apollo has a hard time in the morning.
The night was over, technically. But the day hadn’t really started yet.
I was about to get back on my bike and head home.
She looked at me and simply said:
“I’d really like to hug you.”
She did.
And time stopped.
Or rather…
No.
It didn’t stop.
It just kept moving very, very slowly.
Lazily.
For a few seconds, she was in my arms.
And I was in hers.
Objectively, it probably didn’t last very long.
But those are exactly the seconds that are strange.
The ones that refuse to last as long as they’re supposed to.
The lazy sun was still lingering on the horizon.
The clouds still hadn’t decided to get up.
The whole world seemed to be taking its time before starting again.
And we, somewhere between a night that had already ended and a day that hadn’t yet begun yet, had a few more seconds.
Just enough to live them fully.
Then time returned to its usual speed.
I got back on my bike.
She went inside.
The sun eventually rose.
But some seconds are elastic.
They stretch far enough for an entire universe to live inside them.
And some never quite return to their original shape.