Everyone loathes this hour, this incomprehensible time of writhing sheets and wailing babies. No one knows its name–two? Three? It evades all limit and reason: you can only know with groggy certainty that it’s all at once too late and too early, too dark and too light, an enigmatic marauder of all that is safe and sleepy. While others either despise or avoid this ugly mongrel of day and night, I cherish it. It’s the “when” in which I truly belong.
Sometimes, suddenly, I’m awake at this time. I rise from the bed and feel the ripple of cracks up my vertebrae as I stand with the bones and the soul of a weary old woman. In the bathroom mirror, the sky glowing eerily behind me, I see the ghostly face of my father, as soft and sickly as rice pudding. Then I rub my face, look closer, and darkness strikes me: my mother’s eyes, black and indestructible, smoking with fatigue like two igneous rocks.

I smile and splash my face with water so gelid it burns my skin, but I like the feeling. It’s electrifying, wholesome, and peels the puffiness from my face.

I didn’t used to smile at my face. Once, in fact, I hated my face. But really it was my eyes I hated. Ceaselessly I prayed for blue eyes, blue like crisp autumn skies–anything, Dear God, but the inky cesspools I was born with. The first day of the first grade birthed this loathing: I was standing in the front of the room, the new student, shyly conquering the impossible task of expounding myself in under five minutes.

But no one listened. Instead of ooh-ahhing at my love for Sheherazade’s tales and Chopin nocturnes, key-lime cupcakes and fresh tennis rackets, my classmates grew silent. Tonsils jiggled. Runny noses stopped. My shoulders drooped as I realized they were gawking at my eyes. Korean-cut, small and insignificant as the crusts of bread, my eyes deemed me alien. At lunch, my classmates prodded my face with their sticky fingers. “What are you? Where are you even from?” Horrified, I impaled my baked potatoes with a chopstick while I stuffed my face with forkfuls of spicy kimchi, determined not to answer. Through boiling tears I glimpsed the cafeteria window, behind which a perfect blue heaven beamed down at me. I prayed very hard that night.

But as I matured I found harmony where others found cacophony: I discovered a profound liberation in embracing my muddled identity. Between the dark, immigrant ink and pale pages of authors Amy Tan and Julia Alvarez, I found a shared definition of American: a state of statelessness, of belonging nowhere and everywhere at once. Proudly do I munch on Myeolchi-bokkeum (dried anchovies) with my oatmeal, down a cup coffee in the mornings, and sip buckwheat tea in the evenings. I caress the black and white keys of my piano with equal affection, and accept the childish heart and pensive soul, the flaws and strengths, the um and yang, that sculpt me constantly. Night and day, I nod to the tempo of my inner equilibrium reaction as I concoct my thoughts into the worst and best solutions.

Still, I will always belong to this sacred and elusive hour. How murky and misunderstood it is! When I look closely, I see how the skies are cloaked in chiaroscuro, the embryos of color just beginning to wrap their fingers around the hills. I begin to notice its tenderness, how it harbors all pigment, welcomes all children, and bathes all in dreams. I like to fall asleep with my eyes on the churning clouds, my jaw slackening in awe. I sleep well knowing that I am American, resting during the time when Americans rest. It’s a simple thought, but it never ceases to make me smile.