Briefly Lit Spaces
We usually follow each other into the deep. I sit on the couch eating twice cooked pasta (three times if you include the microwave) and wait for the night to collect me. You bang on the back door hoping to blow through like a strong breeze; picking all of my papers up and shaking them from one break to the next. My hands are unsteady. I can't tell if it's the lack of practice and coordination, or if my muscles are getting lazy with all of my inactivity. I focus the available energy on a single imprecise brush stroke. It carries us close to the edge but we can't sit there together well. I dislike how many times I have to stop what I'm doing in order to take my jacket off, or to put it back on again. I should be consoled by the fact that this is the beginnings of better health; that the antibiotics are working. Mostly I find it irritating. Maybe I should let you in? That eager breeze that you are. You crash and sook and drag your face across the glass. A membrane of solid sand lies between us and how the nature of our domestic life has changed. Once you would have howled at the moon, and I would have looked up into the sky without ceiling, or the closeness of walls, and all of my soul searching would have been done by gazing into the stars instead of glaring at the empty cavities of the fridge. I'd kill for some cake. This distance between us now is simply there because I'm fragile, and afraid of your unpredictability. I think you've sized me up pretty well despite this, and take every occasion to prove it. We travel from one room to the next - me on the inside, you on the out - watching our shadows float across tall windows and briefly lit spaces. Just chasing. When the lights turn off we finally catch and merge into each other and everything else in between, like brush strokes - with me on the inside, you still on the out.