Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

They had a rule. It had formed without discussion, the way most real rules do, through repeated practice until it became law.

The rule was: you could wake the other person up for the important ones. Not anxieties, exactly — not the three AM spirals that you had to learn to ride out yourself. But the ones that felt urgent in a way that went beyond function.

The rule had no formal name. Isla called it the 2am rule because that’s usually when it applied.

Tonight she was lying in the dark with something she couldn’t name pressing on her chest, and she turned over and touched his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you awake?”

A beat. “I am now,” said Callum, without any accusation in it at all.

“I can’t sleep. I’m —” She paused. “I don’t know what I am.”

He rolled toward her. In the dark she couldn’t really see his face. “Scared?”

“Not exactly. Just. Heavy.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he took her hand.

“Tell me something,” he said.

This was the other part of the rule. Not *explain yourself*. Not *what’s wrong*. Just: tell me something. Let me in somewhere.

“I was thinking about time,” she said. “About how we never know if we have enough of it.”

He held her hand a little tighter. “Yeah.”

“That’s it. That’s the whole thought.”

“That’s a big thought to have at 2am.”

“Most of the real ones are.”

They lay there in the dark, her hand in his, the ceiling above them the same ceiling it always was. She felt the heaviness slowly shift — not disappear, just redistribute between them.

Some fears, shared at the right hour, become survivable.

✦  Today’s Reflection

Are there things you process alone that you might be able to share — and does your partner know they’re allowed to knock on the door of your 2am?