Something Good Can Happen After 3 am

There is a short window of time, right after the moon sets and just before the preglow of sunrise begins to show over the horizon, when the sky reveals its more oft-missed wonders to me --- the stars.

Under the right conditions and with a lot of luck, I can usually make out a lot more of them than one usually sees in the city, given that I'm viewing them through a sickly mixture of halogen and fluorescent lights. Watching the sky in all its glittering glory takes me back to sleepless summer nights when I was a teenager, when my friends and I would go to the beach and wait for the sun to come up. We would sit on the sand, listen to the waves lap up the shore, and just talk for hours on end. Good times.

And although I am a fan of daybreak, there is just something about a starry sky that holds me in awe and makes me feel a little more hopeful that the coming day is just going to be all right. At an age where mornings are viewed with so much disdain and dread, I believe I may just have found my own slice of heaven.