I keep thinking of everything I will miss.
As I wish the city goodnight, as I draw the curtains, I think: How I will miss the city lights reflected in the rain on my window.
I pause, look out our bedroom window with Katherine against my hip. We peer down onto the street, the same visual fragment of street I've seen from that window for six years. The slick pavement, all the lives moving below. How I will miss the hubbub. Long clear beads of rain smashed against the glass - refract the red green orange gold lights of the city into a shiny melted crystal crayon mess all over the window.
Time to go draw a new picture in the woods. Bring lots of black crayon. It's dark in them there trees. But the stars are bright, almost as bright as the shiny clean air in my lungs.
--
In the woods, night presses thick as fur against our house. Night feels liquid as the cat that curls its body around your bones. Darkness becomes a Thing that pushes against you,a Thing that you push against, like a gale force wind - a Thing that you close doors and windows to in case it leaks through, in case it seeps out your candlelight - yes, it presses its liquid breath against the glass until, maybe one time, you throw your front door open to it. Break the seal. Relief. Pause, breathe. Now night is a cool hand on your cheek, a lover you can't see only feel, a friend you forgot about until now.
Dive out your door, look up through the trees holding the sky in place. Swim through the cool black, maybe through the quiet, over the bridge, maybe to the neighbors for a visit. The embryonic darkness, you don't realize it overtook you until you tumble into their house, into chatter, golden light, the living. It does feel good to break through the black, to lose yourself in it. Night is such a different story in the forest.
I feel like Mary Poppins - walking in to a painting, but I will stay for a while and it will become real.
