This is actually installment 2, but nevermind. 30 days, 30 stories - that's my goal. Hopefully this will help me beef up my writing comfort and accuity!
It was always sunny. The high, noonday sun. And by always I mean every single day, all day, no night. There were no stars, no moon, just the endless arc of blue that was the summer sky. And as much as I wished for some gloaming, evening, something to break the monotony, it would not come. The only thing that changed was the temperature. Sometimes it was a little cooler, sometimes a little warmer. This was how I mapped my days. And by the hours I went to work, the clocks that clicked by on all the walls. But three in the morning was just like three in the afternoon - work became an every-other-day affair.
I asked other people if they missed it. I asked them if they were as tired as I was. I was always tired. But they looked at me concerned for my mental health and asked me if I was joking. They laughed or shook their heads and affirmed the weather was great and they were going jet skiing with their boyfriend later. I felt like I was going to cry.
I was always tired. Tired and I missed the dark. I missed the shadows between dark and light, I missed the way the shadows from the trees emerged, danced around them slowly, and then merged into a blanket. The way the night breezes seemed to sigh in their sleep, as if the whole earth was dreaming, or on some nights it was as if the winds were awake rather than asleep, dancing and shouting and partying the night away. I missed the stars and the heavens, and the way they seemed to revolve around me. I missed the vastness of a dark heaven and began to hate the ever-closed blue of a sky, sometimes with clouds scudding through it listlessly.
I don't know how this happened, whether it was sudden or gradual. I couldn't really remember, but I knew I remembered a time before. And I knew I was exhausted. And I knew that others didn't seem to care.
One night - that is, one gap day, I went to the library looking for respite. There was no rest at home. The daytime tv went all day now. There was no evening programming because there was no evening. The library never closed because it was always day. So I went inside and sat down in a desolate chair. There were a few other people there, but almost everyone was out enjoying the weather, having picnics, taking hikes. I didn't want to picnic and a hike without a tent and a fire and ghost stories seemed less than thrilling.
I looked around listlessly, wandering from aisle to aisle. In the library I could pretend the dark still existed, because it was generally flourescent there anyway. I wandered into the back stacks. Into the stacks near the custodian's closet where I didn't usually go. And there, stacked higgledy-piggledy in a little alcove that seemed destined originally for a drinking fountain or a copier, there was a stack of shiny-covered volumes, with names like 'Astronomy through the Ages' and 'The Night Sky.' I was elated, and grabbing an armful, scurried off to a nearby corner to peruse.
I did peruse. I lost myself in visions of space and darkness, of the nighttime that everyone seemed to have forgotten. In love with visions of stars I remembered from frosty wintry nights, from times around Christmas when I would slip out on the deck and take in the bright starlights, I flipped endlessly through pages covered in the darkness that I longed for.
Many weeks I spent like this, wandering in the annals of an age disappeared, until I knew every crevice of each picture, every detail of each star. The position of the arc of night in summer and winter, spring and fall. I touched and watched the pictures, the static recollections of a camera, trying to capture something so very timeless and yet so very alive.
I was home one gap-day, sick. I had gotten into the habit of getting sick. I missed my nights of rest and my body couldn't handle the way the sun beat down on it, flooding it with UV from noon to midnight and back again. I lay in bed, miserable, trying to block out the light until, in a feverish mood, I thought to paint the sky I loved upon my windows. I wanted it so. And so from memory I painted - painted it in winter, with some clouds billowing from the South, in the wintry winds, in fall, when the winds were wild and hedonistic, settling into their icy selves of the later months and then revolting, in the summer, when stars blinked at the impertinence of the sun to take up so much of the day, and in the spring when the stars were soft and hopeful, kindly giants smiling on the pregnant earth.
I painted and I hummed a tune to myself. And then I fell asleep, asleep in a revolving world of night when all was peaceful, filled with lights and lightningbugs, and the soughing softness of night breezes. When evening came to fill up the houses with the shadows that it amassed outside their doors. And I dreamed until I awoke, with a start, to a stygian dark.
Rushing outdoors, I realized that my dreams had come. The dark had fallen to the ground and covered it. There, in the sky, hung the stars - shining as they always had. Timeless.
How much of their history had I lost in my days of light? I don't know. But I know that darkness, as well as light, is my dear dear friend.
