5:07 in the Morning
Strong in the streets. Unsteady in the heart.
Summary: This piece is a late-night confession from the space between exhaustion and hope. It follows my sleepless morning after coming home late at night from Brooklyn, New York City, where the weight of organizing, loneliness, and unspoken longing collide. Caught between the discipline of struggle and the desire to be loved, wrestling with fear, aging, and the quiet ache of returning home alone. Through fragments of insomnia, reflection, and a poem that reignites the fire of dreaming, this story holds onto a stubborn belief: that even in the deepest quiet, love is not late—only on its way.
I lay down at one. Four hours of sleep, if I’m lucky. My body is tired, but my heart won’t listen. The nights have been restless lately—sleep coming in fragments, like a promise that keeps getting broken. Sometimes I wake up with my heart pounding, like it’s trying to run somewhere my body can’t follow. Palpitations. Anxiety.
That quiet fear that creeps in when the room is too silent
and the loneliness has too much space to speak. Nobody tells you how heavy it
can feel to come home to yourself every night. Maybe it’s the weather.
Or maybe it’s just the season of my life. On the drive back, the streets felt longer than usual. I had just dropped off a comrade at her place. We talked about work, about organizing, about plans for the next action—the usual language of purpose. But there was something else sitting in my chest, unspoken. A sentence I didn’t dare to say. Not because it was dangerous, but because it was vulnerable. Maybe it’s not love. Maybe it’s just the idea of love that keeps me awake. A fantasy I replay in my head, mistaking longing for destiny, confusing comradeship with something warmer. Maybe I’m just trying to turn friendship into a story because I’m tired of the quiet. I keep myself busy.
Books.
Exercise.
Guitar strings under my fingers.
Paint on a canvas.
The endless motion of political work—meetings, rallies, and
the discipline of struggle. And still, the loneliness finds me. It waits until
the world goes quiet and then it knocks harder, again and again, until sleep
gives up on me. Sometimes I tell myself maybe I’m not meant to be a lover.
Maybe I’m built for the long road, for struggle, for resistance, for being a
soldier of justice. A warrior, always preparing for what’s coming. Strong in
the streets. Unsteady in the heart.
That night in Brooklyn, New York City, at the gathering of
organizers and revolutionaries, the room was alive—laughter, ideas, fire in people’s
voices.
So many beautiful women, I told myself—but one of them drew my attention without trying. Young. Radiant. Carrying her passion like a banner. It was the same comrade I drove home that night.
I kept myself in check. The age gap stood between us like a
mirror. I didn’t want to look into it for too long.
I told myself: She deserves someone lighter, someone closer
to her time, someone without these late-night silences.
And then I came across a poem in my library of books in my
living room:
How Old Are You? by H. S. Fritsch.
Age is a quality of mind.
If you have left your dreams behind,
If hope is cold,
If ambition’s fire is dead,
Then you are old.
But if you take the best from life,
If you keep the joke alive in your days,
If you still hold love—
No matter how the birthdays fly,
You are not old.
So no—I’m not old. I’m still dreaming. Still foolish enough
to believe in soulmates. Still romantic enough to want love to arrive like a
long-awaited letter. The fire in me flickers sometimes. Some nights it feels
small. But it hasn’t gone out. If anything, the desire to love is growing,
quietly, stubbornly, refusing to be extinguished by loneliness.
Maybe I’m not meant to rush the moment. Maybe love isn’t late—maybe it’s simply finding its way to me. Until then, I drive home alone, and on some nights, sleep refuses to come.
And I whisper into the dark, half-joking, half-praying:
Let it be soon.