All I have is time
I had it before, but now it stares at me.

The morning waves, the evening scowls
My watch holds my wrist

Patiently

My head falls through the pillow
It screams and pulls my eyes open

And my watch is waiting, staring:

3:00am

---

Discussion

I wrote 3:00am in the first week after I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumour. The results of the PET scan had shown a “localisation” in my pancreas. This was both good and bad news: good news as the localisation was only in the pancreas (meaning that it had not spread), but bad news as it confirmed that it was indeed cancer. I was struggling to sleep, but fell into a strange pattern of nodding off at around 2:00am, only to wake up at 3:00am again. I wrote the poem after the third consecutive night of checking my phone and seeing those fateful numbers again.

Although the poem seems depressing, I actually take a fair amount of humour from it now. The idea that a specific time was haunting me felt quite pertinent at 3:00am when I was struggling to sleep and worrying about my diagnosis, but in the morning was quite funny again.

I still regularly wake up at 3:00am, but have been using that time to write and learn how to structure the blog. It has become a favourite time of mine to work, so overall this is a true redemption story!