Reading Poetry Aloud at 2 AM — And Finally Hearing My Own Voice

My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Reading Poetry Aloud at 2 AM — And Finally Hearing My Own Voice

By Ben, 33 — Madison, WI

I have spent the better part of my adult life surrounded by words that belong to other people. That is what being a librarian is, really — you become a keeper of things that were never yours. You shelve them, you recommend them, you press them into the hands of strangers who need something they cannot name. And somewhere along the way, you forget that you might need something too.

I want to tell you about a night in February. Not because anything dramatic happened. Nobody proposed. Nobody left. There was no crisis, no revelation delivered by a therapist or a friend with a glass of wine. It was a Tuesday, and I was alone in my apartment, and for the first time in what felt like years, I was not performing the role of someone who had everything figured out.

Let me back up. I had been in a relationship for four years — a good one, mostly — that ended the previous autumn. Not with fireworks, just with a long exhale. We had become two people sharing a lease and a Netflix queue and very little else. When Marcus moved out, I expected to feel gutted. Instead I felt a strange, cottony numbness. Like novocaine spreading through my whole life. I went to work. I came home. I ate pasta from a pot. I slept on my side of a bed that no longer had sides.

My friend Rae noticed before I did. We were at a bar in late January — one of those places on Williamson Street with too many ferns — and she said something that stuck with me. She said, “Ben, when was the last time you did something just because it felt good? Not because it was productive or responsible or good for you. Just because it felt good.” I opened my mouth and nothing came out. She wasn’t being cruel. She looked genuinely worried.

The Quiet That Got Too Loud

I started paying attention after that. To the way I moved through my apartment like a guest. To the way I never played music unless I was cleaning. To the way I showered with the efficiency of someone late for a train, never letting the water just run over me. I had become so careful with myself, so economical, that I had stopped experiencing anything below the neck entirely. My body was a commute — something I tolerated to get from one task to the next.

It sounds strange to say this, but I think I had been numb for longer than just the breakup. Maybe years. I could trace it back to my mid-twenties, when I started taking on more responsibility at the library, when I began defining myself entirely by what I could do for other people. I cataloged rare editions with gloved hands. I read aloud to children every Saturday morning. I answered questions all day — about holds and fines and where to find books about grief or divorce or how to talk to your teenager. I held space for everyone. I held none for myself.

The apartment was quiet. Not peaceful-quiet. Abandoned-quiet. The kind of silence that starts to feel like an accusation. I would come home at six, heat something up, and sit at my small kitchen table scrolling through my phone until my eyes burned. Then I would go to bed and lie there, aware of my own breathing, unable to sleep but unwilling to be awake.

One night — it must have been early February, because the radiator was clanking in that particular desperate way it does during the coldest weeks — I got out of bed at half past one. I was not hungry or thirsty. I just could not stand being horizontal and conscious for another minute. I walked into the living room in my socks and stood in front of my bookshelf, the one good piece of furniture I owned, and I pulled down a collection of Pablo Neruda that I had not opened since college.

I do not know why I started reading aloud. There was no audience. The windows were dark. My upstairs neighbor’s footsteps had long since stopped. But I opened to a random page and I read the first line, and my voice — my actual, physical voice — sounded so foreign in that apartment that I almost stopped. It was like hearing a recording of yourself and not recognizing it. I kept going.

Something Opened

I read for maybe forty minutes. Standing at first, then sitting on the floor with my back against the couch, the book balanced on my knees. Neruda, then Mary Oliver, then a few pages of Ross Gay. I was not reading for meaning. I was reading for the feeling of the words in my mouth, the vibration in my chest, the way certain vowels made my jaw soften. It was purely physical, and it was the first time in months that I had paid attention to how my body felt without immediately judging it or trying to fix it.

I cried a little. Not the cathartic, cinematic kind. Just a quiet leaking, like a faucet that needs a new washer. I was not sad exactly. I was thawing. That is the only word for it. I could feel sensation returning to places I had shut down — my hands, my stomach, the backs of my knees. I had been so convinced that the numbness was permanent, that it was just what happened when you lost someone and turned thirty and lived alone. But it was not permanent. It was a door I had closed, and I was standing in front of it with a book of poems like some kind of key I had forgotten I owned.

After the poetry, I did something I had not done in a very long time. I ran a bath. At two in the morning. I poured in some of the eucalyptus oil that Rae had given me for Christmas — the bottle still sealed, because of course it was — and I sat in the water and I let myself just be a body. Not a librarian. Not an ex-boyfriend. Not a responsible adult with a retirement account and a well-organized spice rack. Just skin and heat and breath.

I will not give you every detail of that night. Some of it is mine to keep. But I will tell you that I found something in a drawer afterward — a small device I had ordered weeks earlier during a late-night impulse I had immediately tried to forget. A HiMoment thing. I had shoved it under my socks like a secret, embarrassed in the way you are embarrassed when you admit you might have needs. I used it that night, and it was not revelatory in the way advertisements want you to believe things are revelatory. It was simpler than that. It was permission. Permission to feel something on purpose, after months of feeling nothing by default.

What Grew From That Night

I wish I could tell you that everything changed after that. That I became some enlightened version of myself who meditates at dawn and journals by candlelight. I did not. I went to work the next day and shelved returns and answered the phone and ate a mediocre sandwich at my desk. But something was different, underneath. A small pilot light had been relit.

I started reading aloud regularly. Not every night — maybe two or three times a week, always late, always alone. It became a ritual without my consciously deciding to make it one. I would brush my teeth, get into bed, realize I was not ready to sleep, and go to the living room and read. Sometimes Neruda. Sometimes Adrienne Rich. Once, an entire chapter of a novel by James Baldwin, just because the sentences were so beautiful I wanted to feel them in my throat.

I started other things, too. Small, physical things. I bought a better pillow. I started stretching before bed — not yoga, nothing aspirational, just moving my body in ways that acknowledged it existed. I began cooking actual meals instead of heating up frozen things while staring at my phone. One Saturday I walked to the farmers’ market and bought a bar of soap that smelled like cedar and black pepper, and I stood in the shower that evening and just smelled it, eyes closed, water on my shoulders, and thought: this is mine. This moment, this body, this small pleasure. Mine.

That might sound insignificant. But when you have spent years living from the neck up — when your whole identity has been built around thinking and helping and organizing and giving — discovering that you are also a creature who can smell cedar and feel hot water and hear your own voice filling an empty room, well. It rearranges something fundamental.

Rae asked me a few weeks later if anything had changed. I told her about the poetry. She laughed — not meanly, warmly — and said, “Of course it was books. Of course.” Then she asked if I was sleeping better. I was. Not perfectly, but better. The apartment did not feel abandoned anymore. It felt private. There is a crucial difference.

What I Know Now

It is April now. The radiator has stopped clanking. I leave the windows open some nights and let the spring air come in, and I can hear the frogs from the marsh at the edge of town if the traffic has died down enough. I am not in a relationship. I am not looking for one, though I am not opposed. I am doing something harder and less photogenic: I am learning to live in my own body without apology.

I still read aloud. Last week it was a poem by Jack Gilbert — the one about finding out the trout were eating themselves in the hatchery. I read it standing by the open window, the cool air on my collarbones, and I thought about how easy it is to consume yourself when you forget that pleasure is not a luxury. It is a signal. It is your body telling you that you are still here, still capable of feeling, still worth the effort of a bath or a poem or a bar of soap that smells like a forest.

I am thirty-three years old. I am a librarian in Madison, Wisconsin. I keep other people’s words safe for a living. And at two in the morning, sometimes, I take some of those words out and I give them to myself, out loud, in a room where no one is listening. It is the most honest thing I do.

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