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Jammed a pair of earbud headphones in my ears and put my ipod on shuffle, curling up against the darkness in my bedroom, refusing to let another untimely breeze stir up would might prove to be a good night’s sleep. One night of odd winds opening doors, acceptable. Two nights, plausible, sure okay, maybe odd. Three nights? Too absurd to think about.
For a while, the music helped. Unaware of the room around me, a parade of midget strippers could have bounded across my floor and out my window without me noticing. But after about an hour, I was still awake and my mind was wandering. Each track ended with a fresh state of panic, eventually leading to me clamping my hands over my hears, the sheet over my head (much too hot, but what can you do), refusing and, for some reason afraid, to let any sound in.
I knew. I knew as deep as my bones that if I gave the night a chance, gave it opportunity to enter my world, it would happily accept. Like welcoming the vampire past the doorway, opportunity was invitation.
C’mon in, Monster. The water’s warm.
You force your heart to quiet, your mind to relax. That there is nothing to worry about. That the worst case scenario involves a door opening. Another freak breeze – three times is the charm. Likely if it occurs three nights in a row it’s time to get maintenance out to your place because it seems something has broken and is steadily recurring on a schedule -
Might even cause bigger problems later on. Best get that checked out missus.
Yes. The voice in my head was right. It’s a new home. A cheap apartment complex. Two looks at the molding in the bathroom and master bedroom would give you any indication of the place’s slapstick fragility.
Perhaps it was the manner of any restless sleep that eventually propels the sleeper into unconsciousness; perhaps it was enough reassurance to push me into a sweet bliss of security; perhaps I was just too tired…
3:57 am
I came awake quickly, as if startled by a sound, or a slap in the face from some nightmare. My eyes, adjusted to the light, searched around the room.
Shit, I thought, the old fear cursing through my veins, a cold chill sent shooting to my limbs, electricity making the hair stand up on my arms, the ipod isn’t playing anymore. Perhaps a sleep function. Perhaps the playlist ran out. Perhaps I’d shut it off in my sleep. Didn’t matter.
Was that door closed when I went to sleep? Half asleep, groggy, despite the surge of adrenaline. Maybe. Did I leave it open so that I wouldn’t feel so trapped? So that I could hear? But I didn’t want to hear. Why would I leave it open? Why would I close it?
The thoughts and questions and fear focused my brain into a more attentive state.
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. The door open or closed. Who cares. You’re going to kill yourself with worry.
I was right. It was a stress I didn’t want nor need, and seemed miniscule. It was the idea of an intruder I was most worried about, someone else to share my space with. The Stranger and I had become friends, but in such a case I was the intruder, he the settled. Anyone else with the gall to sneak into my space in the middle of the night, motives as unseen as he, could not come with intentions pure. The scent of malevolence carried along with the memory of opening doors in the night, running along the same path as the chill in my blood.
And to top it off, as a source or an addition to my already stable fears, those thoughts allowed to wander in the night, a memory surfaced from what felt like moments before, a dream before my rude awakening, but just as likely from the week before. In my mind’s eye surfaced the fuzzy image of the Monster standing in the corner of my room, hidden in the shadows but with enough mass to catch out the corner of my eye, staring at his feet because I was afraid to make eye contact, even in the dark, to look anywhere near his head in case his eyes should catch a hint of the streetlamp and cast a light of their own across the room to meet mine. It was with eye contact that he’d get me.
Funny the directions your mind feels acceptable in the darkness of the early morning.
*
The sunlight sparkled from the caps on the water, the ripples and the waves shuffling across the surface of the lake, reaching as if toward some fold in the air unseen, reaching a wet finger like a key in a lock, twisting, scooping, caught, for a second a tear, a sparkle flashes, a hint of a light normally invisible, from just beyond what we know. I wanted to dive into the water and chase them as they spread across the surface, like lightning bugs on a summer evening – an insect Colorado seems to be without.
Like small people trying to get my attention on the water, flashing lights, waving in my direction, saying hello while with joy they’re tossed from one cap to the next in the breeze and afternoon sunlight, giggling like the little ones on the beach not far down the way.
I had to get out of the house again. I’m not a shut in. Not really. I’m lonely, yes. I’ve got some emotional issues I came here to work my way through, yes, but I am not afraid to leave my house. I’m not afraid at all.
And today is Memorial Day, the unofficial start to the summer time, when the bikers and sports cars come out of hibernation and growl at the sky to say
I’m back. Did you miss me? You can’t escape you know. You can run but you can’t hide.
I wanted to put my toes in the sand and let the water wash over my feet as the slow ebb came to the beach edge, but the sand was weedy and the beach was filled with families taking advantage of the long weekend, welcoming the summer more gracefully than those on the road. Instead I stayed near the rocks, a good spot of sun overlooking the gentle flow of the water.
It was peaceful. The sunlight melded with the water with gentle touch, interchangeable for a moment as one reflected the other. There’s something special about the water, the way it can do that, the way it can refresh and sustain, to nourish, the true source of life. In the way that light hits the massive, casting a hard shadow and absorbing the light, the violence is at once sudden and sharp, an order long since taken at face value, light and darkness, the slicing cast. The water, on the other hand, is something graceful, no hint of shadow save the darkness hinted at in its depth, the liquid is reflective, casting light back, catching the better properties of the glowing sun and tossing sparkles from one end to the other.
A motorboat and waterskier whipped past, catching the edge of the water and motoring back out into the middle of the lake. The ripples said, If you must, and continued along their way toward the shore, hitting the rocks with a murmur that could be interpreted a curse, but then a child giggled from somewhere on the edge of the rocks and the idea was gone.
You roll with it, you accept, you reflect the light and let your depths remain hidden but not inaccessible. If one should choose to dive, let them dive.
Summer had fallen in the foothills of Colorado and in the heat of the sun, a single tear crept down my cheek.
“We’ve had a good spring,” a man says to his friend as he walks across the rocks further above me, near the parking lot. “Not a lot of winter runoff from the melting snow yet, but you’ve got to remember we’ve had a cold May up until only a week or two ago. It’ll get serious soon.”
“Take a look at the water line; it’s higher than I’ve seen since we started boating here in 2000, we’re sure not doing bad for ourselves this year.”
“It’s gonna be a good summer!” The men climbed into the pickup truck and slammed their doors, the motor gunning a minute later.
It was hot in the sunlight and I still wanted to cool my toes in the water, but I didn’t. Instead I walked along the rocks back to the road and along to the parking lot. Maybe some other time.
Finally. After fighting and checking back all day again and again, the internet seems to be back up and running. Having lived through the rise of wireless internet throughout dorm after dorm, apartment alike, rundown homes, and stealing unprotected networks from the neighbors, I’m used to internet flukes, but it makes them no less annoying.
Anyway, last night I fell asleep early, around ten thirty in my bedroom. At last, after so many late nights, troubled early mornings, serious sleep waiting only until dawn, my body was too worn out to make it, and I crashed hard barely a page into my novel.
3:37 am
I remember the time because I awoke staring at the clock. My eyes were half open. I couldn’t be sure I was even awake until I’d forced my mind to clear in order to process the time.
3:38 am,
it now read, the glowing red bars adding to the seven in a flicker. Still half asleep, I rolled over slowly, facing my door. My bedroom was pitch dark, eyes either struggling to adjust or failing altogether. My blinds were closed, keeping away just enough of the streetlamp glow.
I heard it. The door, squealing open, singing out against the dark. Passing the halfway point, it went silent, gliding along on better greased hinges as it always did when I’d opened it.
A moment. Two. Absolutely still.
No light in the hallway either. I don’t expect I’d have seen my hand in front of my face, the blackness was so thick. My brain was too fuzzy to consider the options, my heart reacting in the way my brain refused.
The wind. Suction from the open window.
My brain did not respond, did not throw back a retort about the lack of sound of the blinds clacking against each other as they would in such a gust, or the necessity of the front door having to open at the same time to change the pressure and suck my door against its frame.
But then the squealing again. Obviously the door was now closing, taking its sweet time. The part that sent the chills was when I heard the knob turn, reaching its end like racking the slide on a weapon, the way they do in movies. The latch sliding into place sounded like a bullet sliding home.
And then again, stillness. Full quiet. My brain did not speak. My mind did run with thoughts, fear-ridden and coated in that spellbinding phobia, the back-and-forth, the shadow and the glow of the afternoon sun, no argument about cause, about rationale, about a presence felt or unfelt in the shadows of the room; Monster. Stranger. Something else.
True, my skin crawled, but my heart rate resumed, and I fell back against the sheets, curling up, pressing it from my mind.
“There’s a fully natural explanation,” I mumbled, staring sightlessly at the wall next to my bed. Denial didn’t keep me facing the dark. “I’m just too tired to think… to think right now.”
And somehow I managed to drift to sleep again.
*
Daylight. With it reason and only the fuzzy memory of something waking me, a door opening, the clock, forcing myself back to bed. In the light, the suspense of the night is discarded, forgotten, become the stuff of dreams. Childhood past, passed, behind me, brought back by my grief, loneliness, my childhood creative back on again and into overdrive, reality become boogeyman.
In the daylight, it’s painful memory around each corner. It’s lonely.
It’s Daddy knocking on the door to say goodnight and prayers. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” Pauses in between to mark breaks from memory recital, verses. I’d grown up thinking the prayer started, “Nie-a-lay-me.” Some strange syllabic word I’d not yet learned, but recited happily along with my folks.
In the daylight it’s tears, as if to rhyme and parry those matching assaults at night.
Truth be told, I’m getting frustrated. I moved out here to get away from my loss and pain. I moved out here to pick up pieces and get a move on, not to wallow in pity and dig myself into a worser state. I’m discouraged and angry. Blowing small things into proportion, making nothing of something, waxing poetic in a therapy that does little in terms of redirection, redirecting instead to a dark place I don’t want to go, a place I see as only being just two doors down from where I’d just left,
where doors opening slow in the night are only a rhyme and parry to match those assaults of the day.
Shit, I’m losing my mind.
Storm clouds moved in this afternoon, those kind of rolling dark gray masses that come in fast and thick, spreading across, reaching for the horizon as if it were their own, the light from the glimpse of sky beyond turning the light to a sickly yellow color that settles into your bones as much as it does the city around me.
I was running errands when the clouds moved in. They brought with them a heaviness that I felt extra aware of, the watched sensation lessening as I fled the house for the relative safety of the outdoors (the shadows weren’t bothering me today, thank god), only to be replaced by the ominous feeling of something coming.
I had to get out of the house. It wasn’t a choice. My grief and restlessness from being cooped up finally brimming to a point of existential paranoia that seems to pervade even the most inane points of life, those odd happenstance that will happen occasionally are suddenly blown out of proportion. It’s especially worse when it comes in the late of night, when I’m most worried, broken down, no light, grieving, battling insomnia to sleep, and then when successful, skirting nightmares.
Last night for instance, scared me good at the time, but now in the daylight it seems childish – almost too childish to post on the blog for the world to read, but to omit such oddities would negate everything I’ve tried to do here.
I slept on the couch again – sleep, lay awake, rest to music, whatever you want to call it. Again, it wasn’t until two or three in the morning that I finally passed into sleep (lately it has gone as late as four some mornings, dawn if I’m unlucky). Come an hour after finally dozing off, I was drawn awake by something strange. Call it a sensation, a presence, something off. The Stranger has been quiet for a while, and I felt at one with my house, him becoming my friend, but the instant that I awoke, it felt as if I had upset him, as if perhaps he’d awoken with me and, still groggy, unsure of where he was and equally who I was, had shouted, yelled at me in shock and surprise.
My headphones were still humming in my ears, my iPod on the sill – Michael Buble or someone of the sort. His voice wasn’t soothing that night. I wanted all of my wits and senses about me. Something was off and I had to know what.
The apartment was quiet. The refrigerator was buzzing, but in between cycles, quiet. A cricket chirped somewhere outside the window, which was once again closed. My heart sped up but as if in response my brain quieted it, dragging fuzzy memories as fleeting as dreams.
You closed it, my mind said. You remember. Fuzzy, half asleep. You didn’t care for the funny sounds out the window, likely just the neighborhood hoodlums being immature, or even something as silly as a stray cat. And you just pushed it closed. You remember.
And I did think I remembered. I’d never testify in court – my dream about the Monster was more vivid than this likely fabricated memory, but it was enough to calm my nerves.
Well – calm the nerves until what happened next. My attention, first focused on the window, was quickly called the door when I heard a click and a funny gust along the building.
The wind.
With a pop, the door opened. Two inches, maybe three. The early morning cold crept inside and chilled me to the bone. I couldn’t hardly hear anymore, my heart pounding so loud in my temples.
“The wind. The damn wind.” I didn’t realize I’d meant to speak out loud until the words broke the silence. The voice for a moment scared me even more than the door opening had. It took a split second for my mind to realize that it was my own, but in that second my blood ran cold, my stomach sank low and a shiver ran up my back. My brain was flooded with images of the monster, the cloak shuffling along the carpeted living room, my hand on the cold doorknob, willing myself to turn it, to not look back, to not meet his eyes.
The door opened a bit more.
Forcing myself from the couch was like forcing myself to open the bedroom door, to step out of the shadow; I was not safe staying where I was, the door was open and it needed to be closed, but no way did I want to go near that.
“There is no mom and dad here to save you Katie-girl.”
This time it wasn’t the sound of my voice that surprised me, but the words that came from it.
Katie-girl. That was what my father had called me since as early as I remember. Even mentioning my parents in speech was a shock –
But my brain, perhaps the only part of me bent on my best interest, fought for rationalization, and agreed with me. Yes, I am alone. I am the only one in this house, and I can wallow in it or I can get off my ass and do something.
I tried to take a full breath, couldn’t, then sprang off the sofa, sprinting at the door, slamming into it with my shoulder and shutting it tight against the night.
My skin crawled, cold worming its way across me like the unwanted touch of a barroom pervert.
Back to the couch again, the warm embrace of the blanket.
The cold still lingers. The feeling of being watched felt even more physical than the cold, were that even possible. Though the door was the source of the strangeness, the back corner of the living room was where I felt its gaze.
Were there a monster in my home, that’s where he would be standing.
Now of course this was all a four o’clock sleepy endeavor. My latch doesn’t catch; the only way to keep the door securely closed is to secure the deadbolt, which I’d neglected to do the evening before. Likely a gust of wind had caught the entryway right, swirled, caught the jamb and sprung it. Sure, there wasn’t any severe weather in the area and this had never happened in the month I’ve lived here, there’s first times for random happenings. That’s not so strange.
It was enough to set my mind at ease and get me to sleep again. The feeling of being watched however, was what kept me awake for another hour, until the sun touched the horizon with a cool teal in a cloudless sky out the back window.
My head felt like lead when I woke up this morning, a pressure on my eyelids and an inability to move for a good minute or two. Obviously I haven’t been getting good sleep, even while I have been able to fall asleep, at whatever hour.
Forcing my eyes open, I grabbed my phone to check the time. 11:40. Best I be getting up and getting a shower, I decided. I liked the mid day inside. Probably the only time I didn’t mind being in my house. The outside was bright and cheerful, today a cloudy summer day that only hinted at a building haze that might shroud the afternoon. The sun was above the back patio by now and the house was dimly lit and cool, but not so dark that the shadows stretched long and deep. For once I feel comfortable.
That was, until I looked at the front window, above where I’d fallen asleep on the couch. It was closed. Immediately this struck me as odd – the days were working their way toward ninety (a quick change from snow nearly three weeks ago), and the nights were warm enough that often blankets were too thick, and it was standard of me to keep the window open when I finally went to sleep.
But now this morning it was closed against cool midday breezes that sometimes came drifting inside and often roused me.
Please don’t think I’m suggesting anything… supernatural. That would be ridiculous. And just what I need, ghosts. No, this just didn’t make sense. I didn’t remember closing the window, but I’m sure I did. Probably there were a couple drunks who wandered down the sidewalk and took to cavorting loudly, forcing me to close the window tight in a half-sleep I never fully awoke from. Likely.
But normally most ruckuses move along, and I have to wake up to figure out what’s happening to even decide to close the window. If the party was loud and refused to pass, it’s normally something I’d expect to note.
Yet my memory is empty, completely devoid of any such instance.
Another lose-lose situation it seems. If I’m certain that there was something prompting me to close the window, I don’t remember it, but on the other hand if it wasn’t I who closed the window, what did? Absurdities on both sides, memory loss (or sleepwalking – the thought made me shudder), or something that went bump in the night.
Stupid of me to dwell on it anyway. By the time I was up and moving, a cup of coffee and a shower past, the thought seemed ridiculous, irrelevant, inconsequential at the least. And after writing this I plan to let it slip my mind. There’s no use dwelling on it, no use at all. I’m being driven mad enough without worrying about the little things.
Even though, as they say, it’s God who’s in the details.
I went for a walk today, book in hand, down past the creek and up the street for another two blocks to a sprawling green city park. The fields were covered in dandelions and weeds, but places further south of the creek were more lush and green. I walked to a tree some hundred yards from the baseball fields, empty, the edges sharp, the lines smooth and untouched, ready for an evening game. The tree was thick around and cast a long shadow in the later afternoon sunlight.
I ran my hands around it and stepped carefully around the roots and the pebbly base. Finally I knelt where the grass turned from cheerful green to muted, dark, almost blue. I ran my hand over the edge of the shadow, feeling it, where the grass was warm, cheerful, where it turned cold, a hint of wet. I
I kept my hand moving across the tips of the grass, their ends rustling in the breeze. I studied the way each blade cast its own shadow across the others, swaying moving, a shimmering like river water, first bathed in sunlight, then in darkness. In the setting light, against the movement, it felt as if I knelt on something living, a creature beneath me, each blade of grass sharp, teeth, rows of them.
I stood up and looked toward the sun. I squinted in the bright light, closed my eyes against the solar heat, felt the sweat prickle at my temples, the edge of my hairline.
I turned, the star too bright, looking back at the grass, and I saw my shadow, stretched, too long, a distortion of myself. At once my heart raced and in my fear I slipped into the shadow of the tree. At the same instant my skin grew cold, my blood ran cold and I sat down, hard.
For a moment I was too afraid to move, frozen in a kind of irrational fear. Too afraid of my own shadow to leave the shadow of the tree, but too afraid of the shadow of the tree to stay. My heart raced, my blood ran in my temples, pounded, as if to beat a decision into me.
Move, Katie. Move. Go, get up and run. Get away from these shadows. Get home -
Home. Like that was any better.
Move, Katie. Move. Turn the doorknob. There’s no monster on the other side.
“Perhaps if I just wait until sunset.”
But sunset wouldn’t come for another three hours, and the idea of staying in the dark of the tree for even another ten minutes sent a shiver down my spine that ended at the base of my back and forced its way into the ground like some parasite fleeing a sick host.
Move, Katie. Move.
But there is a monster. The shadow will be there. That irrational fear. This time I won’t see an empty apartment, this time the monster will be clear, running with me, pacing me step for step, long, lanky, some beast mirroring my motion on the other side of the tree, half-disguised in the growth but unconcerned of stealth, no need to hide.
It’s the monsters that hide that you need worry about.
At once the thought brought a kind of comfort that let me break from the tree. As I ran I made a pointed effort to stare forward and slightly to the left, trying to avoid my pursuer to no avail, a blackness from the corner of my eye.
It’s alright, Katie dear. No need to be afraid.
Funny thing, fear.
Even as I write this, it returns, growing in an intensity as if to remind me in the same way that my shadow is always with me that it’s still here and has always been here. There is no irrationality in the moment. It makes sense, it chimes, it beats it’s logic to your mind and whispers voices in the night.
Compounding fear, I hit the door still at a run and collapse against it, closed, inside now, away from the light, trying not to think, trying to dismiss the thought that followed me the last few hundred meters,
Why should I trust the voice that tells me not to be afraid of the dark?
As a child, mothers don’t tell you to be unafraid of strangers, mothers don’t -
I think that’s about all for now.
Tired today. Even as I write this I feel my eyes going heavy, my breath deep and slow. I didn’t sleep well last night. Barely the moment my eyes were closed, I’d spring awake again, unsettled that I’d let my guard down, prepared to leap to my feet when the pounding resumed at my door again. But then it was 3:00, 3:30, 4:00, 5:00, and around five thirty, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, that touch of blue in the east, my body finally shivered into a sleep.
Unable to shake the discomfort by the mid afternoon, I went next door to see if Kyle was home and bored but he wasn’t. I stood on his porch and looked at my front windows, the curtains drawn, reflecting the parking lot and complex on their outside, the glare bright from the slowly falling sun. I didn’t want to go back there. The air was nice. The clouds were moving fast, dark gray, puffy white, blue sky finally behind them. There was a smell of rain on the wind when the breeze shuffled the leaves. I’d stay outside for a while, wander the park, maybe walk down by the creek.
But I didn’t do either of those. Instead I sat down next to a tree in the small complex grassy area and watched the storms roll out to the plains.
Now it’s night again. Black curtains beyond, a mug of tea forgotten on the sill. Blanket clutched tight in a white hand.
The lights are off and the black nuzzles the back of my neck. I force my face to the cold glass and my breath comes in frost. I don’t like the dark. I don’t want the lights out, but were they on, I can press my face to the glass all I want, but instead of the outside, all I see is the reflection of my apartment, a translucent inner picture, waiting to show me something with a fleeting clarity, something I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed, something revealed in that depth of space outside the window, before the reflection, in between.
So I sit in the dark, the feeling of being watched creeping slow like the Stranger at a house party, lingering against the walls and maybe eventually I’ll sleep.
I don’t like this.
1:12 am
Startled awake fast by a rapid pounding on my front door, again. I’d dozed off on the couch under the front window around midnight and I awoke groggy, unsure at first of where I was, what time it was, and what brought me from sleep. Outside the window the rain poured down in torrents, hail coming down in little pebbles here and there along the walk.
At first I thought the pounding was inside, coming in fact, from my bedroom door, as if something desperately wanted out but could not. The nightmare crawled back to mind as I made the mental switch to my front door, where the knocking continued, as if a real emergency. Heart racing, I ran for the door. Who could be hurt? Who could need my help so badly at this hour of the morning? Was someone -
My stream of thought and the pounding both stopped the moment I twisted the deadbolt and yanked open the door.
There was no one standing in the narrow opening of the covered apartment patio. One other apartment door rested closed on the first floor, another two above, at the top of the rickety stairs leading to the doors. I slipped out the door and along the concrete, first checking along the front of the complexes, and then out to the back, where the cars sprayed past on the road. Nothing. Empty.
My heartbeat slowed, but to an irregular, nervous rhythm. Sure, any prankster or drunk college student could have pulled the same fast one on me. Maybe thinking twice would be even funnier, slipping away into the downpour around some back fence or bush.
But it was the abruptness. Not two seconds after the pounding ceased did I have that door open. It would have been timed to a ‘t,’ and the perp would have had to be fast as the lighting that flickered in the west.
I stood at the edge of the covered opening, leaning on the corner of my building, just out of the rain that fell, the mist blowing across my flushed face and neck, feeling good. I stood there for a while. The parking lot glistening, a spray of rain rising off the roofs of the cars like a protective bubble, gliding to the ground in the downpour. Sometimes the rain came hard, pounding and coming down, popping off the rooftops, at other time quieting to little more than a drizzle before quitting completely.
Eventually I moved back inside, making sure to deadbolt the door, trembling as I did so in part because of the cool rain. If just a part. Locking the door seemed to suggest that I’d only have to unlock it again when the pounding came again. It seemed to suggest that I was being locked inside more so than locking the outside out. It felt as if in standing on the porch, running about in search of the culprit, something had slipped through the open door, unseen, now locked inside with me.
The feeling took hold on my chest, gripping tight even as I curled beneath the fleece blanket on the couch again, searching for that comfortable spot that did such wonders nearly two hours ago. But I couldn’t shake it. The feeling from days ago, that the shadows between me and the kitchen, between me and my bedroom, that the deepest were hiding something. Maybe not my monster this time, nor the Stranger, whether still around at all. This time felt like something.
I felt watched.
Turning to the window, I tucked the blanket under my chin and stared outside, studying the way the light fell on the glistening cars, the monochrome orange that layered the parking lot and complex fronts, reaching even as far as the low hanging cloud bank that had moved in above, now breaking up slowly, revealing the darker hints of purple and night above the soft layer. The mist blew in against my face on a cool breeze. I forced my eyes closed, my head still propped on the back of the couch, determined not to pay heed to whatever may be behind me, whatever might have stepped closer while I wasn’t looking.
Better to look outside. Better to be lost in the outside world, feeling a part, reaching, a fingertip from grasping, than to turn and stare into the abyss, worried about what may be staring back. It doesn’t matter how small the monster that hides in the dark, it’s enough to hide, to be anywhere in the darkness. To be anywhere is to be everywhere at once, a furtive gaze, searching for a hint or a suggestion, any indicator that something just may be amiss, that if I were to pinpoint it, just locate the -
No.
This is why I stare out the window; to not look behind me, to not go searching for a presence in the dark that isn’t there, to not make eye contact with the monster.
The afternoon sun is setting, still high above the mountain peaks. But shadows are long, and it’s catching the edge of my window, passing the sill and throwing the dust floating through the air into a fine resolution, a gentle drifting haze, a clarity of that which wasn’t seen before. The dust in the air like the stars in the sky, the sun settles, falls deep, sinks into the ground, darkness embraces, the kind of invisible darkness that lets you look up, and there above, thrown away like studded gems in some black fabric like a ceiling extended too high, as far as you can think to reach, the stars that weren’t there when the sun was still live.
Today the sun was bright. The clouds were bubbly cheerful. The trees rustled amongst themselves in the breeze, murmuring to one another in appreciation the way one murmurs amidst applause following a concerto.
I went for a walk today and found myself in a green space, somewhere between apartment complexes and a housing development, not far from a creek, around the corner, unseen from the path. I threw my arms wide and the breeze ran through my hair and blew it back from my forehead and it caressed my face and blew my clothes back against my body, then turned and gust in the other direction, at once swirling around me in a violent embrace. It berated me in the way of the invisible, whipping about myself, stirring around the land, kicking up the dust and dirt and throwing it around, altogether soft.
The gentle touch of a fingertip across my cheek, as if to brush a tear unformed, or perhaps dried from long ago.
When the dust cleared and the wind settled and the trees straightened, bringing their hands back to their laps and their heads cocked to attention once again, I opened my eyes and the sun made me squint, brought tears to my eyes and the birds in the distance like laughter. I breathed deep. Once in. Once out.
And when the wind returned again, I spun round and ran with it.
When bad things happen, I write more. When the days are long and the clouds are few and the sun is shining, birds singing and wind softly playing through the open window, when life is at peace, I have little new to say. Is there some correlation of meaning? If meaning should be found through words, is there more depth to the darkness? Is there anything more to say when the world is at peace?
There are trees along the fronts of each apartment in the complex, paralleling the parking lot. The trees are trimmed so that the branches don’t scratch and bunch against the siding and glass of second story bedroom windows. These half trees. The one on the far east end, where the row of apartments T’s at my own, the final tree is dead, devoid of leaves, standing barren and vacant.
Every time my neighbors on the south side of my apartment leave, they slam the door and the walls shake, the wood rattles, the doors grumble in their frames.
It’s not that I’m too scared to sleep so much as I’m disinclined.
Outside my window a man asks a girl if she has a cell phone he can borrow. “No, sorry, I don’t.” Which is a lie. He thanks her though, she says “Have a nice evening!” and he tells her to do the same, both with enough enthusiasm that I wonder if they know each other.
Then he shouts, “There is depth on a summer day!”
My blood runs cold. I hear his drunken steps shuffle shoes on the sidewalk, then gone, as if pausing under the streetlamp, but no. Footsteps again, more distant, only passing behind in the shadow of the tree. Seconds later, drifting cigarette smoke through my window, a sweet hint, a knowing sideways glance, at first there and then gone, no special brand of smoke, no special passing knowledge, not special.
It’s one fourteen in the morning. The only suns, streetlamps. The asphalt holds heat. Somewhere, friends smack friends across the face yelling, “Wake up! Good God wake the fuck up!“
If there’s abstraction in moonlight, reflected sunny summer days in blue, should depth of day come where the light does not break so bold, so cheerful, in those small places where the rays only sneak in, between the blinds, when the shadows lengthen and turn purple and deeper tones responds the sky?
I shout out the window, “Is there depth when the shadows are short?”
Someone in the distance yells, “Shut up! Good God shut the fuck up!”
Save the blog, close the computer, lay in the dark.
In the dark, I pretend the ceiling is low enough to touch my nose, then so far above me that the heavens stretch between, supernovae bursting against the paint. A thought sends a shiver colder than the night breeze, a madness physical, it occurs to me only as I’m drifting, an edit to add, bleary typing,
You cannot imagine depth in the daylight without your eyes closed or the lights off.
