3AM is a dangerous time to be alive. Your body is dead, but your mind is surging with electric currents. Everything that would hurt you at 3PM only makes you stronger in the AM. You do not bleed from a cut, you grow wings there.
If you were to ask Frank about this he would look at you and say, "if you believe hard enough at 3AM you will really be able to fly." But you do not know if he's saying this because he knows the feeling during 3AM, or only when he's not sober at 3AM. And living at 3AM goes two ways, and Frank never knows what way it will go for him in that early hour.
The first is you will be able to remember falling, but you will never know that you flew.
This feeling is rare for Frank because living to him means, "you do what you can't when you're asleep. Living is not falling, it is jumping and not knowing you were ever on the ground."
Whatever that means.
The second way, you remember flying threw the clouds, and over the city with no lights on. But you do not remember landing, or that awful headache you will get after 3AM. Frank prefers this way. Because this way he can remember flying, and what happens after you fall. Not just how soft the landing is.
Frank has an altered version of living at 3AM that people do not understand. His words gets jumbled up in his mouth, and stopped by a hard tongue that does not drink the alcohol, but pushes it to his already flimsy liver.
At 3AM Frank is living under too many things to count, but he is living. He is having no regrets. He is doing what the other 7 people awake at 3AM are not. And that is telling the truth, and telling it to the most important person—yourself.
Living at 3AM is not the same thing every time. Some times it is self care and actually sleeping for once, and other nights it is driving down the middle of the road. Two tires on either side of that yellow line.
And Frank still barley knows this.
But Frank's 3AM living is not self care, for him it is drugs. Both legal ones and illegal ones.
Most 3AM's are out in the cold air with the steam horn blowing down by the harbor, and adrenaline running threw his veins mixed with his blood.
But, while Frank is busy living at 3AM—whatever that means to him that night—he doesn't bring his phone. He leaves at home, and he doesn't hear the rings that echos out his open window into the night.
YOU ARE READING
At 3AM
PoetryCOMPLETED At 3AM there are 8 different types of people awake, but in the morning, no one will talk about what happened at 3AM. In fact, some of them don't even remember.
