about other people with their lights on at odd hours—
the neighbor who maybe cannot sleep, too, with the TV
casting its half-life shadows within a house only partly lit in
our town with no street lights, only the flat moon languid in
its inability
to ever sleep at night, the way worry or hormones
or wine or more worry wriggle the legs, coil the sheets and I am left
to pee again or wander even without moving, just my eyes counting
whose windows are rimmed in light or which sounds belong to which
animal—
we’ve caught them on video, skunk and fox, fisher cat
slinking its cruelty across the field while another house whose inhabitants
I don’t know are awake and it could be anything—excitement because
a new baby is coming, or diagnosis grief, or desire for skin or cake. And
all of those imaginings are of course my own self splintered into the houses
of others and it could be self-centered to understand that or maybe gentler
to say we are all awake in different rooms longing for different but the
same things and looking always
looking for light.
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