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.