Two in the Morning With the Light Off

Clare pulls the door to behind her until it is nearly closed, because nearly closed is the setting, and a click would undo forty minutes of work.

Then she is on the landing in the dark, and she stops.

There is a strip of warm light coming out of the gap at the bottom of the door, from the little plug in nightlight with the shell pattern on it. There is a towel folded over the rail where somebody left it. There is the sound of a house at two in the morning, which is not silence, it is a furnace somewhere and a car going past two streets over and the particular creak the third stair makes when nobody is on it.

Her hand is on the bannister. She has not gone anywhere yet.

Forty minutes in there. It is fine, we will sort it in the morning, no, nobody is cross, of course I am not going anywhere. That voice. The one that comes out level and warm no matter what is happening behind it, the one that can say the same sentence for the eleventh time as though it is the first, the one that could talk somebody down off any ledge in the house.

And out here, in the dark, that voice has been put down like a bag.

Her face is doing what her face actually does. She can feel it. The mouth has gone, the whole arrangement has come down, and there is a heat behind her eyes that has not been allowed anywhere near that bedroom door.

Nobody sees it. That is the thing about the landing at two in the morning. Nobody sees it, and there is a second in which that is a mercy, and then a second after that in which it is the loneliest fact in the house.

Because the face she just took off was for somebody. It was work, and it was love, and it went somewhere, and it did what it was supposed to do, and a small person is asleep in that room now because of it.

But out here there is nobody it is for. There is nobody on the landing to say: all right, you can stop now, I have got you. There is a folded towel and a strip of light and a furnace.

Clare stands there with her hand on the rail. She should go to bed. She is aware that standing on a landing in the dark at two in the morning is the sort of thing a person does when something is wrong, and she does not have a word for what is wrong, and she is much too tired to look for one.

Down the stairwell there is the faint orange of the lamp she left on in the hall.

She does not move for a while. She could not tell you how long. Nothing about the landing changes, and nothing about her face changes, and the house goes on making its two in the morning sounds around a woman who has stopped holding herself together and has nowhere in particular to put it.

The face was not a lie

I want to say something about the level voice before anything else, because a lot of writing about this subject reaches straight for the word pretending, and it does not belong here.

That voice was not a performance in the sense of a deception. It was a job of work done on someone's behalf, and it went somewhere real. Forty minutes of steadiness came out of a person who did not have forty minutes of steadiness in her, and a child went to sleep. That is not a mask. That is what love does with a face when there is somebody in the room who needs the face to hold.

Nobody is going to tell you here to go and be honest with somebody about it. That is a thing people say who have not thought about who would be woken up, or what it would cost tomorrow, or how much energy an explanation takes from a person who has none. You are not being handed a task.

What I want you to have is the thing that is true out there on the landing, in the dark, with the towel on the rail.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:12

Read that in the place you are actually standing. The darkness hides nothing from Him. The night shines to Him as the day does. Which means the dark landing, which is the one place in the house where nobody can see your face, is not a place where you are unseen.

You are seen at two in the morning with the light off, and the seeing did not begin when you finally let your face come down. That is not my sympathy, it is what is written in Psalm 139:12, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line like that off the page and puts it beside a woman on a landing with her hand on a rail.

Nothing to arrange before He looks

Here is what that verse does for a tired person, and it is not what you would expect.

Most of us hear it as being watched. Read it slowly and it is the opposite of that. The dark and the light are both alike to Him, which means there is no arranging to be done. There is no version of your face that you have to get on before God is in a position to look at you.

Think about what that removes at two in the morning. The one thing you have not got the strength for is another room to be steady in. And out here on the landing you have already been in the room with Him for the last four minutes, without a single thing being held, without one word of explanation, and nothing about it has gone wrong.

You have been fully known this whole time, and nothing you took off out here was news to Him. Scripture puts the night and the day on level terms in His sight, and the Spirit of God is the One who makes that an actual company on an actual landing rather than a nice idea about omniscience.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not say the dark is bad. It does not tell the person to put the light on. The line is not an instruction, it is a description of what God is like where you are, and it leaves the light switch entirely alone.

You were never required to be lit up before you could be met. The word says the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, and His Spirit does not stand on the landing waiting for a better version of the face.