These days – or I should say, nights – we are a house that doesn’t sleep.
We are working,
or raging,
or coughing,
or sweating.
Some nights we are dancing.
Other nights, we are tossing thoughts out windows, or kneading them into pulp.
Emotions (all of them) tickle our skin or boil our eyes.
The bar downstairs doesn’t help.
We watch old movies,
suck on cough drops,
turn the fans high,
count to 500.
Backwards.
We take turns playing nightwatch to the computers, the glow cast in one room, then another.
1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:00…
We hear the birds – earlier than expected, louder than we remembered.
These are the nights of transition:
as our souls wrestle with crowds of commentators, chattering away in our pillows,
as the earth shifts into new positions,
as our cells quiver from the hard and joyful work of being alive.
mapping the terrain 