It’s a little after ten o’clock on the longest night of the year.
If I had any sense I wouldn’t be writing like this, not when the world is so moody, not when the darkness is so pervasive.
Yet here I sit, somewhat cozily ensconced in the attic amid a few trees lit with Christmas lights, and a universe securely planted on the wings of a fairy, to paraphrase Fitzgerald.
A piano song entitled ‘Winter Solstice’ provides the only sound to accompany my typing. Loneliness resounding, echoing more loneliness. Andy rests on the border of sleep and wake right below me, and I hear the muffled drone of the television as he deals with another migraine.
Drawn to the window, and the blackness of this never-ending night, I pull it open, then lift the screen as well. Leaning out into the night air, I breathe it in – something between smoky and chalky, something filled with the tiniest crystals of frozen water, something that comes out of me in a trail of water vapor barely lit by the distant lamp of a neighbor’s home across the street.
On this winter solstice, I seek a certain solace that I’d like to share, though I fear that’s not coming across, and I’m lost in fragmented sentences, and thoughts that don’t quite coalesce into meaning. This isn’t the part of the process I usually reveal. It’s easier to hide behind distractions than be honest about such things. And oh what distractions I have conjured over the years – the pomp and pizzazz, the flamboyance and frivolity, the masks and the imagined majesty – and oh how tired it all makes me feel tonight.
Perhaps, and quite hopefully, this is merely the passing whim of the first day of winter, wreaking its desolate emotional havoc, warning that the holidays are not to be had without extracting a certain payment – the cost of happiness.
Shutting the window, I curl into myself on the bed, dragging a thick blanket over my legs and surveying the room from this prone and somewhat defeated position. The day has had its way, even with its smallness, and I’m tired.
It is now 10:35. Time to stop this post. Time to shut down for the night.
