The Three O’Clock Reckoning

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From the Desk of Lord Northwood

July 21st, Three a.m., when the heart counts the dreams it has yet to claim.

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There is a particular cruelty to the hour of three o’clock in the morning; it is the time when the body sleeps but the soul stirs, when the curtains breathe in the draft and the silence of the world presses in like damp wool. I wake at that hour more often than I care to admit, a prisoner to a panic that needs no cause but finds plenty — my own mortality, the leering brevity of youth, the cavernous ledger of things undone.

I think of the promises I have made, not only to others but to myself, and how I have let them grow dusty in the cabinet of good intentions. I think of the opportunities I let drift away because I was too occupied with being gracious, too careful with my minutes — minutes that, had I kept them for myself, might have blossomed into hours of something greater.

It is a strange, selfish arithmetic: the notion that a handful of guarded minutes could swell into five selfless hours, that the most generous thing one might do for the world is to be ruthlessly devoted to one’s own vision.

Yet time is no gentleman; he does not linger for us to gather our courage. He moves briskly on, brushing past without apology. The days fly by in seconds, and I am left staring after them, mouth dry with the ache of all I have not done. I want to act, to write, to burn my life into something worth the ink.

But the cruelest truth of the Three O’Clock Reckoning is this: I do not yet know exactly what I want. I only know that I cannot turn back time — and that if I am to leave something behind, I must begin before the clock strikes again. Faithfully Yours, Lord Nicholas Northwood