Things Happen, Plans Change
I wake up suddenly in the night. Fourth night in a row. I know what time it is and which stars will be peeking through the gap in the curtains. I should not be awake, though I don’t suppose I deserve a proper night’s rest. However, tonight, unlike the previous nights, where I simply lay in bed and anxiously wait until either dawn or I slip off, I get up.
I manage not to trip over the boxes littering my room. It’s been a year and a half since I moved in, but I’ve never quite gotten around to fully unpacking. I swore at some point that I was going to paint the apartment and do minor renovations first. I bought the stuff, too, but now the pan and rollers sit abandoned in another room I swore was going to be my office. Or library. Or sewing room.
Things happen. Plans change. Life just gets in the way.
There’s a yard outside my window. It’s large, down a hill, and far more brightly lit than I thought it would be this late at night. Skinny pines dart in and out of their own shadows, which lean away from the hissing light of the incandescent bulbs. I may have been wrong about the stars. The sky from my bed— sideways or upside-down as I try to look through the curtains—is not quite the same here, properly standing up. It is humongous, wide and consuming. The stars, when they peek out from the vastness, are teeth scraping against my vision.
I am ready, I think. For what? I do know, though much in the same way people know an actor’s face, but struggle to place it.
The sky comes down to meet me where I stand. Even as it looms in total of my sight now, the stars still look so far away. I reach out, just to pathetically try and feel them, but one of my fingers brushes against a yellow one.
It’s cold. It burns me, it’s so cold.
I manage not to trip over the boxes littering my room. It’s been a year and a half since I moved in, but I’ve never quite gotten around to fully unpacking. I swore at some point that I was going to paint the apartment and do minor renovations first. I bought the stuff, too, but now the pan and rollers sit abandoned in another room I swore was going to be my office. Or library. Or sewing room.
Things happen. Plans change. Life just gets in the way.
There’s a yard outside my window. It’s large, down a hill, and far more brightly lit than I thought it would be this late at night. Skinny pines dart in and out of their own shadows, which lean away from the hissing light of the incandescent bulbs. I may have been wrong about the stars. The sky from my bed— sideways or upside-down as I try to look through the curtains—is not quite the same here, properly standing up. It is humongous, wide and consuming. The stars, when they peek out from the vastness, are teeth scraping against my vision.
I am ready, I think. For what? I do know, though much in the same way people know an actor’s face, but struggle to place it.
The sky comes down to meet me where I stand. Even as it looms in total of my sight now, the stars still look so far away. I reach out, just to pathetically try and feel them, but one of my fingers brushes against a yellow one.
It’s cold. It burns me, it’s so cold.