Night Shift Girlfriend: Lights Out, Love On
I am Azmi, writing from Meknes, and I keep vampire hours now, not by choice but by rabbit. Almost every night my Dutch girl runs the same show. While the lamps are on she is shy and high-strung, all sideways glances and barely-there eye contact, the kind of creature who startles if I breathe too loudly. Then I switch the lights out, and a different animal pours herself onto the mattress: she climbs into bed, crawls all over me, tugs at my sleeves with her teeth, and breathes heavily into my ear like we are sharing secrets. Lights out, love on. Every single night.
Midnight is her curtain rise. The room goes dark and I feel the small thump of her landing on the blanket, then the careful walk up my side, paws pressing one by one like she is reading my ribs. She settles against my shoulder and begins her rounds. Nose to my cheek. Chin to my collarbone. A long satisfied tooth purr that vibrates through the pillow. In the dark there is no shy rabbit at all, only this warm confident creature who has decided that I am furniture, family, and entertainment in one.
One in the morning, the tugging hour
Around one comes the tugging hour. She takes my shirt cuff between her teeth and pulls, not hard, just insistently, the way a toddler pulls a sleeve to show you something urgent. If I do not respond, she escalates to the blanket edge, then to my hair, which she grooms with great concentration while sitting on my head. 
Her nails deserve a verse of their own. When she kneads and climbs, those little claws rake, and a rabbit who means only love can still scratch a tired human. So nail care is part of our rhythm. I keep her nails trimmed and blunt on a steady routine, and anything I am unsure about, length, handling, or stress, goes to my vet before I improvise. I am just a keeper in Meknes telling night stories, not teaching grooming to anyone else. The rule in this house is simple: comfort for both of us, or we adjust until it is.
Two in the morning is the breathing hour, the strangest and sweetest part. She tucks herself into the crook of my neck and breathes there, warm and slightly loud, occasionally sighing the deep sigh of a creature with no deadlines. Sometimes she licks my ear and then startles herself. Sometimes she flops so hard against me that the mattress bounces. I lie awake listening to the soft night sounds I once tried to describe, the little chatters of dreaming rabbits, and feel absurdly chosen. Nobody else in the world gets this exact concert.
Three o clock, the changing of the guard
At three she takes the first watch so I can sleep. This is our shift system. She sits upright at the bed corner, ears tall, facing the door like a small sentry, while I finally drift off. Twice now I have woken at four to find her still there, guarding, and twice I have cried a little, because who assigned this creature to protect me? An hour later she clocks off by flopping directly onto my legs, heavy as a sandbag, and sleeps the dense sleep of the relieved guard. We trade the watch back and forth until dawn.
Dawn shrinks her back to daytime size. The lamps come on and the bold night creature folds herself away; suddenly she is the shy girl again, pressed into the corner of the room, accepting exactly one head rub before darting behind the curtain. Visitors who meet her at noon cannot believe the night stories. I show them the tooth marks on the old shirt as evidence. The Dutch bunny life, I tell them, is shy by day and lover after dark, and they laugh until they spend one night here and hear the thump of small paws landing on the blanket at midnight.
What I have stopped doing is fighting her schedule. I used to guard my sleep like money, lights out at eleven, phone facedown, annoyed at every interruption. Now the lamp clicks off and I lie there listening for the thump, almost expectant, because the night shift has become the most honest hour we share. Daytime she belongs to herself. Nighttime she lends herself to me. That arrangement suits us both, and I protect it the way she protects the doorway at three.
People ask if I sleep enough, and the honest answer is less, but better. My nights are broken into chapters by pawsteps, and my mornings start with hay and the memory of being breathed on lovingly. Our quilt has become a shared country, the way I described in my notes on sleeping under the quilt with my burrower pressed close. She wears me out nightly and I love it. Too affectionate, the old joke goes, like lobster too juicy. Complaints zero. Sleep less. Love on.
Next in this chapter…
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