Nocturnal

It is 2:17 a.m., and I’m in the enclosed porch again—a space that calls itself a dining room, pretends to be a sunroom, and has quietly agreed to moonlight as my writing den. The table is old. The air is cold. The only lights on are the computer screen and a reluctant glow from the hallway bathroom, the kind of light that has the decency to whisper. I like that about it.

I write here. At night. Mostly because this is when the house is quiet and my head is loud. The brother sleeps in the adjacent room next to my writing nook. My partner turns over in bed, wrapped in a burrito of blankets and dreams. The pets are scattered across couches and cushions like spilled punctuation. This is not my house. I cannot unpack here—not my boxes, and not my grief it seems. The space belongs to Afton Bitton, Swan Valley’s literary grandmother and Airbnb host who is now my ghost writer. Her presence is in the floral wallpaper and the uneven floorboards. I’ve never met her, but I feel her judging my paragraph breaks.

I write because I can’t not. I wake up with sentences forming behind my eyes like film negatives. Thoughts that are too sharp to sleep beside. And sometimes—I wake up to poop.

I wish it were more glamorous than that. I wish it were always some kind of divine call from the Muse or a lightning bolt of lyrical urgency. But the truth is, more nights than not, my body gets there first. I stumble out of bed with the vague intention of peeing, or relieving some mysterious intestinal vendetta, and then I end up downstairs, blinking at the screen. The writing follows the ritual. My digestion has become an unexpected creative collaborator.

So I come downstairs barefoot, tripping on shadows, heart full of half-finished metaphors, and I write them down before they escape. The bathroom light stays on because, well, it started this whole thing.

They tell me once I start treatment, the exhaustion will be total. A kind of blackout sleep that doesn’t negotiate with muses. That thought terrifies me. Not just the fatigue, but the silence. What happens when I stop waking up with words pressing into the roof of my mouth like prayers?

This is the deal I’ve struck: I get the night, and the illness gets the day. I get the porch, and the rest of the house gets to pretend I don’t exist for a few hours. I write on borrowed time, in borrowed space, with borrowed courage. No coffee. Just insomnia and willpower and the unrelenting sense that my life keeps getting stranger—richer, more absurd, more worth writing down.

I’ve started to think of the night as my accomplice. Not soft or romantic, but necessary. The dark is where my thoughts come clean. They show up half-dressed and unfiltered, dragging storylines and confessions behind them like tattered coats. I let them in. I always do.

There’s no pressure in the hours between midnight and morning. Just the soft hum of the fridge, the occasional snore from upstairs, and the glow of a screen that knows all my secrets. I don’t have to be brave here. I don’t have to be hopeful or articulate or anything but awake. And regular.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer