The Voice at 3 AM

There's something about white space, about an empty screen, that drives every thought from my head. If I don't come to the keyboard with a line or two ready to lay down, I just end up staring at the screen with the fond, impotent desperation familiar to all of us who were once twelve year old boys looking up at seventeen year old blonds. The challenge of any empty page is that, more than any reader, it judges what we write. Rilke, Baudrillard, Ginsberg, Wilde, Adams, Broun - they all had no more and no less to work with than do I or any other writer. No color, no harmony, no texture or voice to support, to disguise, the process through which we create meaning. Our only tools are the alphabet and the page's emptiness through which we form the letters that strive to conceal the seductively intimidating presence of the absence of any absolute meaning.

The blank page forces an incredible burden on an honest writer. For as long as we can hold our reader's attention, we create meaning in a world that has none. I write so rarely and always with the comforting distance of irony because it seems to me that if a person is going to create, he ought to have something, some insight, some vision to offer his reader. And, I haven't. I've traveled and read. I've lived a bit. Never loved fully. Never held onto a dream for more than a moment. Still, it might be enough to start writing except that one must be certain - even if it's only of his questions - in order to write well, and I haven't been certain of anything since I was a boy.

My certainty then, came from an intuitive understanding that only the innocent can have. We tend to forget those understandings as we live through the experiences we need to make them meaningful. Now, as I try to find somewhere to begin, I remember something I knew from an early age. Morning is the mother none of us has ever had. Hers is a smile that doesn't age. A smile that doesn't age us. Hers is a hand that comforts without touching. She speaks of nothing but the day's promise. And, she loves not unconditionally but indiscriminately. She does not love us for who we are. She doesn't know who we are. And so, every morning we begin again, new. Loved anonymously and pulled gently toward an open world.

I've always hated mornings. It's the night I've loved since I was young. Night's true charm is the valiance it displays in trying to keep its promise to hold off the morning. Years after I'd forgotten why I slept until morning moved on to care for another part of the world, I left home for Cairo. And, every night at about 2:00 am on my way home from smoking and fumbling for a free thought at my friend's apartment, I passed a woman.

She saw me, and I saw her. She never held her hand out, and I never offered her a thing. She was wrapped in black fabric with only her face visible. Her eyes were harder and her face more worn than the stone of the smudged and stained bridge she sat under. The pieces of cardboard beneath and around her seemed to mark that space her home as clearly as did the walls of any place I've lived. I knew she needed money, but I couldn't give her enough to change her life. I knew that, and I wasn't sure what I'd be taking from her by giving her the little cash I had in my pocket. For all she lacked, she had presence. And, perhaps it was the shadows, but I swear she had dignity as well. I couldn't go into her home and hand her my leftovers. In the morning, she would be a homeless beggar on the streets of Egypt, and I would be a rich, white American. But, every night for the few seconds that we looked at each other as I walked passed, we were equals. Strangers. Equally alive. Both wishing morning wouldn't come and return us to living as the people the world insists we are.