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.