Blue Hour

6/11/2026

Right when something just about begins, the stage-like sky is quietly humming a tune your 5-year-old self would know, the kind you hum when you do the thing you love so much. The song you hum before tipping off your bike oopsies or as you eat your favorite school lunch menu of the week, nachos and cheese minus the animal meat. The song of elementary school summers never leaving. The song of your Dad's pick-up truck returning. The song of all your library-borrowed Barbie movies playing, one family bag of Doritos between you and your only sibling and possibly, only friend. 

Right when something just about begins, the something, that thing. Its sound ticks behind your forehead. Your forehead which leans against the dirty bus and train window, the school window, the car while you have a quick work lunch, the plane window when you gave up and bought the one-way ticket home. There has been an uneasiness kicking inside, like an unborn angry baby. Right before the wish comes true, before the comet streaking the sky, your hands have twisted circles into your thinning hair and your feet have always run away. In between the spreadsheets and the job and the friends and the tiny pockets of you-time and the father and the mother in your life, you've looked up at that night sky, squinting hard to rearrange the moon and the constellations. 

Right before a wish arrives true? There is the blue hour, hair sweeping through, tendrils against your eyes and nose, as you look on a horizon that reveals no signs, except for the song in your heart quietly playing. At some point in your adulthood, in your early 20s, your heart slowly became an old instrument. I lived days hiding my sheet music under the shelves or the crevices of a liver that reacted to one Texas Roadhouse margarita. I lived days disguised as a daughter-maid in the kitchen or in the car between restaurants waiting on the man with a cane or hovering above my sick dog, 2 months and 6 vets at a time. An early check pushed towards me because my boss loves dogs too. I lived days reacting to the mobile and the laptop and boba meet ups which were all fair, all fun, all needed, like a time and a place and my name's still on the roster. I fill it and I add a bit of sugar to my unsweetened teas when I can at the local Friendswood diner. I lived my days getting better at tennis and affording to cook HelloFresh meals and getting my eye makeup all nice, and realizing I was wrong about sperm whales, and that I'm a finance analyst, a government opportunities coordinator, at a cute construction firm. That I ought to stop catching up on my whole day between 10 PM and 1 AM, because I spent all day wondering where my body was needed most and alarmed why it ached so much at the tender age of 25. 

The most silly, worst thing is, I lived days ignoring the banging at the door, someone exhausted and angry trying to push in. Someone I must know, and they are wildly angry. I hear the flurry, the kicks, their elbows and knuckles are raw and their voice rests on a hill I once climbed, its name resting on nothing I could admit to in my mother tongue, but now their voice rings in the bones of my brain, vibrating the base of my knotted neck and inconveniently hard-skulled head. Vibrating until I swear my bones must be thinning or my will is thinning or truly, I can no longer sleep or rest. I must open the door and address the urgent intruder.

Right at the blue hour, right when everything stills, is the song and the voice and my bones vibrating all at once. No one's screaming in this home but I need to silence it all or I will be forced to admit something to the same 5-year old that felt a tug towards anything that glowed with meaning and instead of wishing on stars, wished on full moons. I will be forced to hold her hand again.

The song of my heart played rarely, but when its acoustics reached my stuffy, book-filled room, it is a song hard to hide. There is nowhere for the music sheets to burst from, but break and squeeze out the tiny window in my chest. I'll be someone's elder one day and be unable to describe, what to do when you're lost inside, all this time. The sky is gently lit, neither night nor day. You can't decide. Indecision from door upon door drives you more and more fucking crazy. There's no home no reason no rhyme, that when someone does knock and ask who's there, you wonder if you're the adult supposed to answer. And ponder how might you introduce yourself this time.

At some point, you stop responding to every knock on every door. They tire out. You tilt until you're on your back. Eyes closed, you return to where it is neither night nor day. You return to the thing you forgot you had. The body. And then you return to what the body does when it knows that it is a body. The breath. The breath unto which was your beginning and the cries you first had as a baby, angry that you couldn't already do everything you wanted to do. It is in this memory of the body that stillness breathes freely, like an artist adding the moon. A mind so quiet, vacant now that the unwanted guests are gone, that when the intruder knows it's you they want and elbows your door once more, that door is loudest. No other.

Back to the beginning of my bones and my brain and the girl looking up at full moons.

Everyone has their own full moon and it was she who knocked, pulling onto you with her gravity. She held onto every dream you sent, the blue-white beholder. So calm down, come down. Hum that song that she knows you remember. When you open the door and see her glow search for yours, at the blue hour, right before the wish comes true, you must answer as the adult at the door, the songs you used to sing and the dreams you always had.