There's something about 2 am

I'm not sure what it is, but there is something about this time.  If I stay up this late (which I've been doing far to often recently) it seems that my deepest thinking starts at 2 am.  Maybe it's the quiet, maybe it's the fatigue, but something about it gets me.

Tonight I'm thinking about a friend.  Someone I love.  Someone who's hurting.

I'm also thinking about some music I heard earlier.  Music that fed my soul.  Music that blessed my soul.  And also some music that ripped open my soul.

The key word here is soul.  Music is not a surface thing for me.  It's something that goes to the deepest parts of me and my past.  My mother once told me that when I was younger she could tell what kind of mood I was in by the way I played the piano when I came home.  Piano was my instrument of choice as a child and into my teen years I could and would play for hours on end.

Tonight my head is racing.  The kind of night where no matter how tired you are, you can't slow it down to sleep.  There are happy thoughts, sad thoughts, serious thoughts, funny thoughts, uplifting thoughts and heartbreaking thoughts all racing through like a runaway freight train.  How do I put this on hold?  It's not that I want to stop it all together.  I truly believe that the ability to feel all of these things at once is a gift.  I would just like to calm these white water rapids to a trickle for the evening.

So I did something I haven't done in years.  I went upstairs, sat down at the piano, and played.  I played and I thought and I play and I relaxed and I played and I listened and I played and I played and I played until the rapids were gone and the water was calm.  It was wonderful.

(we'll see if my roommate agrees in the morning.)