The sun rises, pulls up shades, eyelids, and tilts heads to the sky, lifts spirits, and lights the way. Romance over its setting; eyes clinging with sad fascination, sentimental for dying flames and waning embers. Follow it now, down, down, down over the hills, till staring, reality beneath feet, grounded again, seeking sun through the floor. Gravity pulls and draws heavier truths; forces peer through the dark, and examine the ground. Ponder in darkness.

All the while, it rises, ready to raise us from beds and bad decisions, where we’d fallen (fast) asleep.

I lost a day to a curious night – how I suffer for the play and no pause; the food sat too heavy, and my mind’s never ready to admit to the sleep it implores.

Some find a way to recover their might; how they rest before dusk is an art. Even when I’m deserving, I find it unnerving to arrive the same day I depart.

Instead I pray to a mug (held too tight; how it burns me awake through the palms) to speed up the sun from a crawl to a run; pray the moon scoops me up in her arms.

The symptoms hide in silent whirs of hearts that seem both fast and slow, as if the wary beats could stir the beast our world has come to know.

We wear our masks to hide and guard a sickness we cannot discern, and suffocate behind facades of shallow breaths, and numb concern.

Contagions crawl through eyes and screens, they spread through tongues and social feeds, infecting our society with novel mass-anxiety.

The countryside scares me at night, when all I do is wait for the crack of a twig, or spasm of leaves, or single cry in bleak air, not to wake me (for I am never asleep in the countryside), but to jab me again with that white-hot awakeness.

So I moved to the city, instead. At night, I’d leave the window ajar, no matter the time of year, so the sirens, and laughter, and trains, and shouts, and smashes of glass, and loud songs from cars, and helicopters circling, and doors slamming too hard, and nightclubs emptying, and garbage trucks reversing, could sing promises to me, from just-far-enough away; you are not alone, they say. We are here, with you.

But one afternoon, collecting my mail with others in the lobby, a gust SLAMMED its face against the glass, shouting something aggressive and unintelligible; smeared as it left, leaving us with that unsettling feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of them. And, as if word got out, the streets began thinning of souls, dwindling of errand-runners, happy hours, and dinner-guests. An unspoken quarantine befell the city; devoid of people, traffic, and noise.

In our apartment block, we wait, as night rises from the tarmac. That stillness I’d long-feared, and sought escape from, holds us hostage like a small settlement lying in wait of bandits, spotted tearing through nearby towns; indiscriminate in their chaos,

And now they were here…

ready to expand within our pregnant emptiness, and force themselves, screaming, from any crack left unclosed. It begins with a TAP, a CLICK in the window-frame, a whistle through the bars. It teases. Its menacing subtleties come fast then slow, come hard, then soft; it creeps, creaks, and stalks you from the TALL BLACK GRASS. By the time we see the trees moving, it is already done…

SLEDGHAMMERS pound their rubber heads on the walls, on the windows, and bellow their bloody murder through and under our buckling doors, sucking all the air out the room and throwing up all over you. YOU. The one cowering in the storm. The one whose scent is on its tongue. YOU. The countryside has come for you.

I don’t hate the way it obscures the view, how I open the blinds only to be blinded still, because I wake up high in a low-down cloud, shivering on the balcony, peering over the edge, I’ve less fear than usual, as if the sky had brought the ground to meet me, promising a soft landing all the while filling my lungs with crisp, wet air, as I breathe out soft little clouds of my own in the chill.

I don’t begrudge how it makes us hide our skin, bundled up beneath layers of cotton and down, because your gorgeous smile still peaks above the zipper, eyes unhidden and softly aglow, reminding me of what you harbor close and warm under your gaze.

I don’t long for the end of foggy winters, the washed comparison and cooler tones that clears my windows of dust, bugs, glare and streaks, leaving me to survey, whimsically, with tea in hand, curled up with my summer, indoors.