You are not up yet. Still in slumbered bliss while I have awakened early from my midnight sleep into still morning of this world. It aches as if it were the middle of the night, but really it is approaching late morning. The alarm I set did not go off because it really was not set; rather I awoke by chance before any deadlines brought by this day - that is, before obliged to others. I woke too late to study any before leaving. Another day without it. I could not sleep until well past seven. I heard Joan's dishes moving around and I assumed it was by her volition. I got up once to turn on the space heater, convinced I could not sleep because my body could no longer heat itself; and I lie curled and shivering beneath a mountain of down. Then all memory ceases. That's how sleep is in this kind of deprivation: no dreams nor sounds nor any sense of being alive like one would have under normal conditions. No dreams. No sounds. Unconsciousness complete. Like a blink in time: It feels like a second but it has been hours. My love. In this ache of morning spent without knowing, I wish only to reach to you, speak to you, wake to you. It is a long way back across that void to another night when we talked into our screens, and it already feels like maybe that was the dream.