It is late--far later than you realized, the clock's hands rapidly making their way towards midnight.  It is no time for a bubble bath, really, but you simply can't shake your need to get lost in hot water and a thicket of frothy bubbles. 

The past few days were a flurry of moving boxes and running errands and whipping up dinner for family as you all worked to help your sister and her husband move into their new home.  You are dizzy from the movement and the inevitable chaos that is moving a person's home box by box into a new space, to be reassembled into relative orderliness.  Happy to help, yes, but now your body craves a hot soak and your mind the quiet of the late night.

As you draw the bath, you relish the hush of your home, the comfort of being surrounded by your things from books you've read or mean to read, and the ones you toy with bringing to your bubble bath only to be discarded on your nightstand--words are too much for you right now.  You enjoy your candles which you light to perfume your home with the scent of lemongrass and the ever-comforting collection of stones and crystals lining your nightstands and desk and shelves--they calm and ground you, centering you back to you.  You even relish putting on your bathrobe speckled with stars on a midnight sky.  It is yours as is this night.

When your bath is ready and piled high with those bubbles you so love, you forsake the robe and sink deeply into your watery haven.  You will not move for some time.  You will listen to the gentle popping of the bubbles and your quiet breathing.  You will savor the heat soaking into your limbs and the bright tang of lemongrass tickling your nose.  You will let the days of moving wash off you like dead skin.  You will make this the world's longest bubble bath, lazily letting the clock's hands circle past midnight and tick-tock towards one, maybe even two.