We fill the day’s hours moving and shaking, shaking and moving. Some days are filled with more moving and shaking than others. Some days we partake in activities within specific hours: the Bewitching hour, the Twilight hour and for those seeking escape from the 9-5 grind, there is nightly corporate flight to Happy hour.

Happening far too often for my own tastes, I endure episodes of my own personal Un-Happy Hour, The Bruno Hour. It happens with a type of careless haphazardness, after the voice of vodka overcrowds and makes itself heard but before the crowds from closed bars and clubs have finished digesting their late night, post-drinking meals (usually within the timeframe of 1:00 a.m. and 2:30 a.m.).

This “hour,” although termed an hour, can actually be as brief as 20 minutes of condensed communication bursts or can last for up to a few hours. It is not marked by any one thing, as a new approach is often taken each time. These range from his playing the innocent, to the aggressive, to the harassing, to the pleading, to the bargaining, in text message form. These days it is mostly text messages.

As annoying as it had been, it stayed mostly at that, weekly annoyances from someone trying to make contact with me whom I did not want to be contacted by. This changed one recent night when I was sound asleep and was awoken by a series of the Bruno phone calls. The first thing I felt most bitterly, almost violently, was that I had been needlessly awoken when I had just a moment ago been sound asleep. Of my basic, instinctual urges, sleep holds the top spot in my list of priorities. When I don’t get enough sleep, when things prevent me from getting my complete fill of this nourishment, I have a tendency to become extremely unpleasant. And Bruno had so rudely come crashing in that night with cymbals and triangles ringing.

This was when something inside me threw its hands up and I wondered, even in my sleep-doused state, Won’t he ever get it??

The next morning, as I listened to the many messages he had left, I pictured Bruno as a two-dimensional print on a piece of paper. And as I deleted the voicemails, one after the other, I pictured cutting him out of the paper… snip, snip, snip, a cut-out of the paper that is my life. Listen, delete, cut. The frustration and anger I felt that night is now replaced with a sense of hope.

I hope that the Bruno Hour episodes are coming to an end. I hope that my silence will speak volumes. And behind this hope lies my new found meaning behind R. Kelly’s “When A Woman’s Fed Up.” If R. Kelly, a man that can put out a hit single time after time but lives a deviant, perverse life (do you really know anyone who would enjoy what he did?), can realize and come to terms with what happens when a woman’s fed up, I have good faith that Bruno will too.