The days end
The days end. They end early, before the sun goes down, shortly after it rises, either by rotational force or habit. There are a few seconds when I am waking up that the whole sky lifts with my consciousness, filled with energy, everything is whole with the exploding emptiness of the sky. Everything rushes into it and my eardrums are drawn outward with the absence of pressure. It feels right. It pulls me to pieces in a short breath, and then there is nothing where I was, the shadow of a laboured vacuum at a metal table, a lump beneath the sheet, but not me. In that instant every part of me is as far away from itself as it can be. It can only begin moving closer, and the days wandering toward each other, becoming one unending. The day ends when I feel myself all coalescing back together. When the darkness, or the confrontation of some incursive process, changing effects on my body, making my body recognize them and pushing me into one place, into something with edges that ends, whose influence ends, when other stars appear out of the clearing sky above the ocean.
The pressure of walls at night or in darkness turns wet air into ice. I feel myself at the center of an atmosphere that is becoming a hardened tomb. There is nothing outside of my skin. I feel that I am getting smaller and the apartment is drifting on shifting sands or opening into a mountain pass accepting the orange sky. I pull back the curtain. Purple light shades my fingers and washes across the wall. I know the sun has set and no tricks will prolong the day. I need to get a hold of something. Events grow so imminent in the dark. Things feel closer. The sense in my skin and my short hairs that something is moving toward me is communicated from the vacant shadows and spaces where nothing is but could be. When the sun goes down I begin to know all the things I havent seen. Their complicity with the darkness makes me want to reach out into it, to throw up the window and reach my arms into the slim steamy rain. I only pull the curtain back slightly, holding the base against the wall and pulling back the midsection with my pointer finger until it just breaches the jamb I look out with one eye into the swirling night. The streetlamps light slowly from across the horizon in the earlier dark and pace slowly toward the ocean in segments. These are still dark but the moisture in the air is already orange and has a living glow to it, and gives it to everything else and soft shades of brown shape her out of the dim beneath the tree. This time I will let that day happen. So many bits back, when was that day, did it start and finish. What she wants is what I make her want. Where she is is where I have put her. She cant see me. Maybe she can see my shadow on the curtain. I step backward into the room. Maybe she saw the curtain folds waver as I let them go. Maybe she knows I am alive and that she is alive and that cant mean any more. She knows that our pulses are not any more delicate than the eternity of inanimate objects. We can come closer together, but we wont feel anything in the air, only pressure. Because I know that this day is finite, I know that she is the way it will end. When things change they end. I am not ready to start over. Things have been slowing. The days end. In the night I am finite, but the darkness is filled with unknowable multitudes of other finite bits, and I havent time left. It will be she and I.
