とけい
かわるかたち
みずのごとし
clock / changing shape / like water
We were sitting in a 24-hour diner near the highway. It was an ambiguous hour—perhaps late night, perhaps early morning. The sky outside was the color of a bruised plum.
The woman across from me was stirring sugar into her third coffee. She looked at me with the intensity of someone trying to categorize a specimen.
“Are you an early bird or a night owl?” she asked. “You have to be one. It’s biology.”
I looked at my own cup. The black liquid was perfectly still.
“It’s not biology,” I said. “It’s geometry.”
“Geometry?”
“It’s about fitting into the shape of the container,” I said. “I am both. Or rather, I am neither. I am whatever the ecosystem requires me to be.”
The Bone Memory of 4:00 AM
“If you cut me open,” I said, “my DNA probably spirals in the shape of a sunrise. That is the factory setting.”
I grew up in a family with a restaurant. For my entire childhood, and well into the years when I should have been sleeping in, my “normal” was waking up while the rest of the world was in deep REM sleep.
I remember the specific silence of 4:30 AM.
It is a different species of silence than midnight. Midnight is tired; 4:30 AM is expectant. It was heavy with potential. It was the smell of prep work—the sharp acidity of onions, the deep umami of stock beginning to boil, the cold, damp air of the wholesale markets.
That rhythm was burned into me. It wasn’t a choice; it was survival. You wake up because the broth takes six hours. You wake up because the delivery truck does not wait. Deep down, part of me will always be that person who finds peace in the grey, cold light of dawn.
The Neon Shift
“But then,” I continued, “the container changed.”
Life happened. I left the kitchen. I entered industries that didn’t sleep, or perhaps, slept all morning. Suddenly, being awake at 5:00 AM didn’t mean productivity. It meant sitting alone in the dark with nothing to do, while the real work happened under the artificial sun of midnight.
“I had to molt,” I said.
“Molt?”
“Like a reptile. I had to shed the skin of the morning person.”
I learned to love the silence of 2:00 AM just as much as I loved the silence of 4:00 AM. I realized that the time on the clock is irrelevant. The common denominator is the solitude. It is the quiet space where the work gets done.
The Architecture of Adaptation
“Here is the truth,” I said. “We like to think our circadian rhythms are set in stone. We like to think they are personality traits. ‘I’m a morning person’ sounds like a moral stance. ‘I’m a night owl’ sounds like a lifestyle choice.”
I shook my head.
“But humans are masters of adaptation. Your routine is not a personality trait; it is a response to your environment.”
When the environment demanded early mornings to feed a community, I was a creature of the sun. When the environment demanded late nights to meet deadlines across time zones, I became a creature of the neon light.
“So, what are you?” she asked again.
“I am water,” I said.
I poured a little more coffee into my cup. It took the shape of the vessel perfectly.
“I find the rhythm that the work requires, and I make it my home. If the world needs me at dawn, I am there before the birds. If the world needs me at midnight, I am there with the ghosts.”
We are not defined by the hour hand. We are defined by our ability to sync with the chaos.
I drank the coffee. It was hot, bitter, and necessary. Outside, the sky began to lighten, just a fraction.
“I suppose that makes sense,” she said.
“It’s survival,” I said. “Simple as that.”
life 