Cold night

It is a cold night. Not like last night; last night had clung to me, formed a clammy air-tight tunnel and funnelled me through its time, each second hanging from my brow in its desperate wet hot marbles. I had sat about my desk near naked, angular, a twisted skin cupboard of bone integers that refused to add up; bent heavily over a mass of blueprints, schedules and probabilities.

I had looked up at God then, at the squinting black window: feeling neither the priest nor the mathematician on my side. Feeling nothing at my side. Feeling just the thick speed of sweat rushing through the hairs of my skin like foxes in a thicket.

Each new line of text sitting as a new grid on my mind's floor, into which only further numbers and circumstances could fall and bubble up through; each minus slitting a new eye into my face with which I could see more of what I did not want to see, what I could not make sense of, what I could not pin down nor set right.

Somehow sleep had come to me and I hung across the levers and iron threads of my suspended consciousness spitting balls of my guts at stars and watching them slick acid trails down the sky into the forever deep.

But this; this is a cold night that follows. The piercing breaths spark the skin into hills and spike the mind to concentration. There is nothing but the paper and the paper must be solved. Condensed. Made real. Sat within the folds of my dressing gown my gaze again drifts to the dribble of window and the outside world made so unreal by its wooden, whimpering frame. A wind turned feral cries the names of strangers elongated and foul like a sky breathing slow motion ghouls. I cannot keep the window in its place, its lip so frequently prised open.

A sharp gust and an eruption of air flooding through that now hole in the wall, chased of its pane; papers everywhere; a chessboard in frantic, senseless motion, as black flies black on white on black. I cannot chase this into reason. I turn my back to the last of their falling. There is a table, and a pitcher, and a glass, and a bottle. So less than full. So much more than empty. I cannot. There is not heart left in me to drown. I turn to the sprawling couch, that sits, an unrolled and limp padded tongue. And I am thrown to it, a bag of fish bones, without a dream to swim in.

My head turned away from all.
And it is cold, tonight, and I draw my body's curtains around me.

It is still, and eerie still; that still of a mourning in plotting, a straight with an inevitable corner; I feel myself whispered downstream. With each and every stepping stone of consciousness I feel myself break, the sweet and painless cracking of ice. And then a soundless howl; the world's held breath is blown full force into this brick container – I feel even my mind tossed as if at sea, ships crashed against rocks and rocks jumping at sea: there is no comfort for me, there is no comfort -

A singing still. A warbler might quake to break apart her beak to chance a note, but nothing more. I know without looking that the room I have tried to block from me is at the most offensive state of disarray and yet still I look. A peek, through my blanket skin. And there is nothing.

I rise, and look before me. Everything has been swept clean; all my hypotheses and equations have been turned to nothing. All dust, all ornament, all distraction. All content. It is a shell. Yet somehow warmer. The window has been set somehow right; it holds behind it a distant cry of gale, burbling over far off hills. The frame purrs and sinks into the wall like gum. It is warm enough to sleep now, surely.

In place of all the complication that once there was, there is one single object. A white flower sits daintily in a glass breath vase upon the desk. In the darkness of the room she is a rose moon.

I slip only into simplicity as my skin touches back to the arms of the couch that breathes upwards to hold me and all my silent moments. A blackness in my field of vision, and one, pure, breathing, white. And it is warm enough to sleep now, surely.