There is a certain kind of chaos that hits at two in the morning. Not emotional chaos. More like a restless, slightly delusional urgency where my brain decides my entire life would make more sense if I moved my dresser three feet to the left.
It happens out of nowhere. I will be lying there, overthinking something pointless, and suddenly I am on the floor unplugging lamps and dragging furniture with the strength of someone who definitely should be asleep. It feels dramatic, but in a satisfying way.
The funny thing is that rearranging my room at that hour never feels overwhelming. It feels like clarity. My space turns into this physical version of my thoughts. Messy at first, kind of embarrassing if anyone walked in, but slowly starting to make sense as I move things around. A pile of clothes becomes less of a crisis. A crooked mattress becomes some kind of metaphor. Everything feels temporary and fixable.
I think that is why I love doing it. You cannot fix your whole life at two in the morning, but you can move your nightstand and pretend that counts. And honestly, sometimes it does.
From the moment I wake up to the time I sleep, I spend every moment active. That may be because I procrastinate and hold off until the last minute on a lot of things.
My day is kick-started at 7:30 when I spring out of bed to throw a hoodie on and make it to breakfast, and check in by 7:35. After that, the majority of the school day is spent working hard in class and focusing on doing the best I can.
The few breaks are still spent actively as I socialize with my friends all throughout the day. After school is sports. After sports is the gym, then I shower and go to dinner. After dinner is the study hall, and finally, after all of the rush, it is 8:59. My mind goes blank and fuzzy during study hall as I wait one last minute to enjoy the finale of my day.
Once it is 9:00, I am free from all the responsibilities of the day. I blast the best music with my roommate and make TikToks just for fun. I lie down and put on a show and absorb it effortlessly. I take too much joy in my free nights and end up staying out late. I never realize the consequence until it’s 7:30 and my body is numb as I jog to make breakfast.
The night sky seen from the city of Ojai is very beautiful. The fact that the moon is the same no matter where in the world you look at it is very strange. I think it is mysterious that we share the same thing no matter how far apart we are. I never get tired of looking at the moon, which has a different face every day. Also, the moon that hides behind clouds or lights up the dark streets with faint lights at night is always fascinating to see. In my home country, we use such a moon as an expression for confession. When we express our feelings to others, we sometimes feel embarrassed to say the words directly. Japanese people in the past had such words as well: The moon is beautiful. When Soseki Natsume, a famous writer of the Meiji era , was an English teacher, he was asked how to translate “I love you,” and he replied, “Japanese people don’t say that. You should translate it as ‘The moon is beautiful.” In the past, Japanese men were embarrassed to say “I love you” to the woman they liked, so they said, “The moon is beautiful, isn’t it? Some of those words were, “I want to watch the moon with you.” or “The moon and you are both beautiful.”These are very romantic and can probably only be expressed by referring to the moon.
Although the air is frigged on this winter night, we drive around blasting music with the windows down.
Why one may ask?
Because sometimes there’s no purer form of joy than singing your favorite songs with two of your favorite people.
In that moment, all your fears and worries fly out the open window and you are living in the moment, watching two people sing and smile with every word that leaves their mouth.
This is one of the moments that you would replay over and over again when you rest your head on the pillow for nights to come.
I would not trade the little moments like this for anything.
So the simple answer to why we drive around with the windows down on a frigged winter night is simply for the joy of it, because in the end, you only have once chance to make memories like this with the ones you love.
Last year, something horribly tragic occurred on a large road about a quarter mile away from my house. In the early morning, around 4am a car crashed into a tree carrying four teens, three of them dying on impact. It was horrific, I didn’t learn about it until later that day. However, the night of the accident I had a horribly lucid dream in which I woke up in my bed and it was pitch black. The only reason I could see anything was because of the pale blue tint to the pitch black night, my windows were open and I could see out into my street. All of the sudden a shuddering scream arose in the distance, so prominently loud, accompanied by millions of other screams; the world was crying around me, falling into indescribable chaos. I was confused to begin with, until I could feel the feel screams shift as if they were a wave, the amplitude approaching my street, and it was in that moment that I completely froze. It felt as if every soul, petrified in doom, burst out in a thunderous cacophony of deafening terror, a vocal representation of the gothic interpretation of hell. I was unable to move. It felt as if the screams were searching, surveying the world for a single living thing, for me, and any movement I made would lead them straight to me. So I waited, I sat there and waited as the apex of noise approached, peaked, and as it passed I simply awoke. I checked the time to see if I could return to sleep and I saw that it was only 4:30 in the morning so I could get back to sleep, it took a while but I returned to sleep peacefully, although still bothered by the dream I just had. I woke up that morning with the dream lingering in the back of my mind but without much worry attached to it, so I went about my day as if nothing had happened, because to me, nothing had. We went out to lunch, on a different road from the wreck, and when we returned we came down that road where my father told me about the conversation he had with one of our neighbors earlier about the wreck and how it had happened there early in the morning yesterday. And as the words left his mouth the feeling of dread became so strong that I couldn’t speak. I just sat there dumbfounded as we approached the site of the crash where a candlelight vigil was being prepared.
This one will be a lot shorter than the last one I promise.
Nearly two years ago, I was camping with OVS, 15 of us out in the sandstone canyons of Utah, unspeakably peaceful. In fact, I enjoyed the tranquility of that small, isolated river valley so much, I decided to spend the night in my hammock so that I could swing as the whirling breeze carried me to sleep. However, that night was a wild one for me and you’ll soon understand why.
Around 10 o’clock I get into my hammock, laying down as I watch the moon rise over the other side of the valley, a few stranglers dragging themselves into their tents, and I decided to retire as well. Maybe three hours later if I remember it correctly, I awaken to the sound of voices coming from the kitchen area, they all seem to be laughing, having a great time, then I look at my watch and it reads one o’clock. INSTANTLY I freeze- this isn’t right, I say to myself as I peak towards the opening in my sleeping bag, the absence of light confirming my suspicions.
I try to play it off as a dream, my dream continued even after I awoke, I tell myself unconvincingly, the voices are incredibly vivid, I can hear their laughter bouncing against my eardrums, it has to be real. A few minutes pass and they begin to call my name, like the sirens that taunted Odysseus on his travels, I too was being deceived, their welcoming calls making me all the wearier. I am fully awake now.
The minutes crawl by as these voices continue, situations changing constantly, from their beckons for me to get breakfast, to claims of me missing out on a glance at a nearby fox, they become eerier. These voices, maintaining their soothing tones, vary in their distances from me, somethings being five feet away, sometimes their voices traveling for seeming leagues before reaching me. But don’t doubt my account yet, because it only gets worse. After maybe 20 minutes of the voices, I begin to feel something brushing up against my swaying hammock intermittently. This feeling of helplessness consumes me as I can only fumble for the pocket knife buried somewhere in my sleeping bag (I sleep with one while camping now after that first encounter).
My senses take over and my imagination runs wild, the voices grow stronger, and with only the light of my watch reading 2:15 to convince me of my awakened state, I can’t help but feel as if a man is standing over me, watching my hammock sway, letting it brush against him in the periodic gusts. I can’t believe what is happening to me, the winds continue, but they don’t blend with the voices, they still call me to reveal myself, to emerge from my safe place, my empty tent four feet away, but impossibly out of reach. I feel a large round object protruding from the darkness against the left side of my back, maybe a foot away from where the man must be standing, the object stabilizes me, I cannot move now.
Maybe the winds pushed me into a branch, jutting from the sickly tree holding up the feet side of my hammock, further inspection the next morning revealed that there were none near me. I am trapped in my own sleeping bag, unable to find my knife, unable to escape the voices, the man, the fear that’s overtaken me. I lay still in this sweaty hell until 3 am as I remember it, then I must drift off at some point, exhausted by the sheer terror I felt that night.
The next morning I approach my classmates, bemused as to what transcribed the previous night, upon recounting my tale, I am met with blank stares, concerned faculty, and one bright face. One teacher, my advisor, recounts a story of a man and his donkey, this man traveled into this river valley in Utah some 80 years before and was never seen from again. He suggests that this man tried to beckon me out of my hammock for a companion to wander the endless nights of these canyonlands, the voices were his attempts, the brushing was the man standing beside me, and the object jutting into my back was the donkey, standing loyal at the man’s side.
I don’t know what I believe, I don’t believe that I could ever believe that story my advisor told me, but if you ever find yourself in the desert, and you hear the voices of your compatriots, calling you into the night, take heed of my warning, but make your own choice, for if I were to return and hear them again, I may just see what the endless nights have to offer.
Also, I slept in a tent the next night, wasn’t about to lose another nights sleep to a ghost donkey.
Up on a large hill, or a small mountain (wars have been fought), you would expect the view to be utterly amazing.
And it is.
The mornings can surprise you; you may walk into a cloud of mist with the sun shining through powerfully and cloaking the campus in gold. Some days the sky is a magnifying glass to a sun, blinding white, and permanent sunglasses are needed by everyone.
Nighttime is difficult. The campus lightly shines in yellow, star-like lamps that scatter almost randomly across stairs or walkways, and often overpower the stars.
To stargaze on campus means you must search high and low for the best, unlit spots. There are two areas that I have concluded to be the best spots for the right stars.
The first spot is the lower field, or the big field, while we’re playing glow-in-the-dark capture the flag. I have found out that, if I just stop what I’m doing and lay down on my back, the rest of my team will follow. If you lie down on the right spot the campus lights will not hinder your eyesight, and the stars will shine to their full extent.
The second spot, an easier spot to reach, is the newly built staircase. At night when the sun has fully set and things are quiet, perhaps at 9pm or so, there is a particular step on the staircase that you can stand on and the trees around you will block out the campus lights. Then, if you look up, it looks like the stars are framed by the trees.
No I did not sneak out of the dorm at 9pm to watch the stars.
It seemed as though the bears had multiplied over the winter. The summer before had been filled with distress calls to wildlife control, news reports of bears all over the county, and the not so rare sighting. This year, however, officials reported a record number of calls for help, my own grandmother accounting for many of them, because a bear had broken into someone’s house and they had been woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of the refrigerator being raided for a midnight snack. Bears were no longer afraid to meander into town and did so at their leisure. I remember working at the bakery one day and a customer came running in, shouting that a baby bear was stuck in a tree a couple blocks over. It made the headlines the next day.
My friends told their stories of running into a bear, whether it be hiking in the middle of the day or walking home at night. I would refuse to walk the short distance from work to my house after getting let out at midnight. I would beg friends for rides if my dad had already fallen asleep, but even so, I often ended up walking. I did my best to avoid any situation where I would run into a bear, but I wasn’t completely successful.
I had been babysitting a boy who lived up the road from me. Because it was such a short distance from my house to theirs, the dad walked me home instead of driving. We were walking, talking about his kid, when we passed under a tree. The night before us was made pitch black from the shadow of the moon, and we heard a twig snap. Immediately our attention was drawn upwards from focusing on the road in front of us. Not even five feet away I could barely see the silhouette of a bear. He was huge, bigger than I expected. I am certain he was taller than me, even when standing on all fours. He didn’t even look at us.
Surprised out of our minds the dad and I jumped to the other side of the road. As soon as we were out from under the shadow of the tree we could no longer see him. He had the perfect camouflage. We continued the short way to my house, where I practically ran inside.
What struck me was that had it not been for that twig, an insignificant object we pass by on a daily basis without second thought, we would never have seen the bear. We would have walked right into him. Even though we were scared out of our minds, and stood on the other side of the road scarcely daring to breathe, the bear never even looked at us. We were as insignificant to him as a rabbit.
After that, I would absolutely refuse to walk home. If my friends hadn’t driven, I would call my house repeatedly until my dad woke up and drove the seven blocks to come get me. Seeing the bear, taller than me even when he wasn’t standing up, absolutely undetectable had it not been for that one twig, made me realize just how powerful those animals are. It is a beautiful sort of power though. Being so dark one can blend into the night, so silent that one can go unnoticed until someone has walked into you, and so huge that even the bravest person would follow their instinct of flight. To me there is nothing more majestic.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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