Four a.m.

“The bus ride, I went to write this,
Four a.m… this.. letter.
Fields of poppies, little pearls,
all the boys and all the girls,
sweet-toothed each and every one a little scary.
I said your name.” – R.E.M., 1995

It was four a.m.

I am certain that nothing ever good has happened to me by being awake at four in the morning. My alarm awoke me, a mere forty minutes previously, the phone vibrating on my bedside drawers, the sound burrowing its way into my temples. My legs lurch to the floor and I make a sound like a child’s neglected electronic game where the depleted batteries force it to make a final cry. I’m reminded of a passage in one the Red Dwarf books about how a man who was so afraid of dying through the night, after he read that most night deaths happened at exactly three twenty a.m., so he set alarms, klaxons and lights to go off in his quarters every single night in order not to be awake for this time.

Within a week he was dead.

At exactly three twenty a.m.

The bloke in the bunk below had shot him.

Bleary-eyed, I stand at Buchanan Bus Station. It is still dark. My body doesn’t know what is going on and my brain is in little mood to answer its questions. Optimistically, I have my journal in hand in order to write my early thoughts, starting as I mean to go on for this trip. Realistically, I step onto the bus and monosyllabically moan as I hand over my ticket like a feeble zombie and put my journal back in the bag.