The Night Before Everything Changes

There is a specific quality to the night that precedes a significant threshold. Not every night has it, and the ones that do are not always the ones that were expected to. Sometimes the most significant thresholds of a life arrive without the preparatory night, without any atmospheric signal that what is about to happen is about to happen, and the before and the after are separated only by the ordinary darkness of an ordinary night that offered no announcement of its own significance. But sometimes the night knows. Sometimes the hours before the change carry a particular weight, a specific density of feeling that the body registers before the mind has adequately processed it, a quality of suspension in which the present moment seems to exist in an unusual relationship with time, stretched somehow, more vivid than the ordinary hours before or after it, charged with the specific energy of the before that knows it is a before.