The museum of three in the morning

A few years ago I came across The museum of four in the morning, a crowd-sourced website curated by a poet Mr Rives documenting the references made to this time of day in art, culture and elsewhere. The site is built so that each time you open it, a new video or picture containing the reference appears, proving to be an endless source of fascination. 

Over the past few months, while preparing for my final exams I went off the grid and stayed awake till unearthly hours on more days than I'd have liked to. Consequently, I inadvertently created a museum of three in the morning for myself except each day I had a new curveball hurled at me before I could recover from the previous one. 

I've never been a morning person. So by the time I got to bed, an early bird friend of mine would just be waking up. The solace derived from knowing that you're not the only person stranded mid sea and that there are others on the same boat is perhaps one of the few things that put me to sleep. Human companionship is one of those things make difficult experiences mildly tolerable. One of the protagonists in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe captures the warmth of this companionship when she says “Come to think of it, Idgie and Ruth bought the café in 1929, right in the height of the Depression…but at the café, those Depression years come back to me now as the happy times, even though we were all struggling. We were happy and didn’t know it." While I did not go through anything half as morbid or torrid and I'm not unhappy in the aftermath, the sentiment remains.

Much to the amusement of those at home, I have been talking while being fast asleep - babbling garbled nonsense like "the decision has to be made now" or "ninety percent of the liability has been settled". I think my parents and grandparents unfortunately bore the brunt of the many and varied mood swings and cold feet I developed while my sister took on the role of Chief, Entertainment by the time the ordeal was done and dusted.

Nearly resorted to this

It did not dawn upon me till now that during the past few months the world had not come crashing to a halt merely because I was functioning under the metaphorical rock. For the first time in over a decade, I used the messaging app on my phone to actually talk to friends, instead of searching for an OTP. I don't know how they put up with me but I'm glad they did because whenever any of them gave me a call to check in on how I was doing, wish me luck and tell me about their day (wisdom teeth extractions included) to remind me to drink water or send pictures of some truly stunning food up for grabs - it made me smile instantly. I think I just got by with a little help from my friends.

Given that I did not have too much free time anyway, whenever I did manage to sneak in a break I tuned into City of women, The Desi Crime Podcast and The Oversmart Girls Podcast (on the blue moon that I did not spend it catching up on sleep). On hindsight, maybe the best combination and you'll figure out why probably once you listen to them.

While I'm glad that the exams are now a thing of the past for the moment, I do miss the luxury of being able to stare aimlessly beyond the balcony at eleven in the morning and figure out which mango is going to fall off the tree today.

P.S Big Big Big mentions in alphabetical order Aarchisha, Abhinav, Adithi, Ananya, Anshumaan, Avinash-Bhavana-Smriti, Harshu & Ksheeru, Prabhav Bala, Prathikka, Raina, Sadhana, Shivani, Shyam and Sreekar 😀😄