Usually I fall asleep early. I like it when the day ends with clean, simple things - a hot shower, hair smelling of shampoo, phone tucked under the pillow. But sometimes, once a month or once every six months, something wakes me up in the middle of the night - and then everything changes.
I go to the kitchen barefoot, pour water into the teapot and sit right on the floor, with my back to the wall.
On such nights, I like tea - green, slightly bitter, the kind that invigorates, but does not tear you back into wakefulness. I sit and think. For some reason, only at four in the morning do answers come to what seems confusing during the day.
The tea gets warmer, then cools down, and I sit and feel how everything inside calms down.
When I was twenty, I thought that in life you need to do everything during the day: do it, prove it, explain it. And then I came to this strange understanding - sometimes everything important lives in pauses.
You don't have to talk, but be silent. Don't answer right away, but smile a week later. You don't have to rush after someone, but leave the door ajar - and let the one who decides to come in.
I love people who aren't afraid of their pauses. With them, you don't feel obligated to prove anything. I love people who can sit next to me at night, when the whole house is asleep, and just pour me more tea.
Sometimes I think that happiness is not loud toasts, fireworks or victories. Happiness is tea at four in the morning. When you know that everything is still ahead. And you are not in a hurry.
Tea at four in the morning is the most honest drink. It doesn't require cake or company. It tells you: you are here, you are alive, you can hear your thoughts.
Sometimes I fall asleep right in the kitchen - in the morning the sun wakes me up, I climb into bed still warm from my thoughts. No one knows what I came up with there. And that's the most wonderful thing.
I want many more nights like this - not because of the tea, of course. But because I like hearing myself.
And it's also a good way to remind myself: no insomnia is scary if you know how to embrace your loneliness.
Perhaps that's why I love these nighttime pauses so much. They remind me - it's always quiet inside us, if we allow it ourselves.
And even if the kettle sometimes boils at the wrong time. It means that something important wants to be heard right now.