Nocturnal

I became nocturnal because I could no longer face the wide expanses of cheerful, sunlit days. They mocked me in my blinking dimness, my silly misery made especially silly in comparison to the contagious joy of bright blue skies and a yellow sun. As ideal as a happy child's drawing. Especially in the early autumn. So I opted for nights.

Nights fool you. They make you feel like you are never alive. The things you'd normally do during days are not doable during nights, so you feel excused from ever doing them. And they never get done. And you never do anything. You just crawl sluglike from the over-bed to the under-bed, growing paler and thinner and more and more of an idea than a person as the weeks go on. Weeks of sleeping and reloading and drinking coffee and staring at blank pages that stifle your interest in filling them. You have nothing with which to fill them. You have become empty.

Those who are like this: we cannot depend on each other. Like ants in a swimming pool. If we climb atop each other, some of us will drown. And the dead cannot support the dying for long.

all material copyright laura podolnick, 2005-2006.