Light/Dark

It's barely still Thursday, and the world is sleeping. My parents lie parallel in their immense bed, my sister tangles warm brown arms in her covers, then tosses them to the floor. . . I am sitting on the floor myself, in the dark.

Light has deserted this entire house, except this glowing screen, and I keep thinking I should push myself to my feet, uncross my legs, wend my way across the den (rendered maze-like by rearranged furniture) to the light switch that waits so stoically on the wall. I should not maroon myself in this blackness, should not fix my eyes on the screen. I feel like a traveler lost in a trackless forest, drowning in black branches and susurrating leaves, who can see only the moon, and so stares up at it. His world telescopes into that one white disc. His mind blocks out all that is around him: all he would be able to see in the day, and all that is beyond all that he would see. The dark still presses, but it slips off his mind, which is concentrating all its power on the Moon, the waxing gibbous Moon. He hugs himself in the dark dark dark, this small figure, and leans his head back. He gazes and gazes, lunatically.

And now I will darken my moon (my computer screen). I will rise and thread my steps through the furniture, tread gingerly across the papered floor, find my room, my bed. Find sleep.