Rosette Skies

The hours before dawn are the darkest. There are so many ways of looking at that sentence, and it does seem rosette and promising if you’re inclined to optimism and the like. Having watched dusk and dawn relentlessly over the many moons of my life, I think one of the few things that has changed apart from the colour of the skies at these times in the various cities that I’ve lived in, is my perspective at that statement.

What really surprises me is the starling difference between day and night. How days are filled with activities and little tasks and thoughts and odds and ends. And nights. How they are filled with such unbearable darkness. I think I have begun to almost fear them now. Long, never ending nights.

How I fill these hours is something worthy of a prize of sorts for the angst and somewhat distraught. What do you really do, once you have grown out of being a party animal, have had enough of night outs with friends and beloveds, do not have anything captivating enough to read, and do not like the humdrum and noise-like qualities of idiot boxes and ear plug-ins?

You spend long, endless nights. That’s what.

I think I am now familiar with all the patterns of the night. The little noises the security guards make, the distant barking of stray dogs, the guy in the apartment across who reads in bed with the blinds up till two a.m., and the occasional police and ambulance sirens. These are things nights are made of.

Sometimes there are people sleeping over in my apartment. Sometimes in my bed, sometimes on the living room couch with Tabby the Cat alternating between our bodily warmth. It is funny, is it not, to finally realise that you are growing into that old lady who lives alone in her apartment and who loves her cat more than just about anything else? Clichés are such ironic fun, especially if you find yourself being one.

Here is another night
Slipping into the sheets of day
Part pubescent, part sombre
I wonder what it is like
To be able to fill this world
With all your darkness

You come and go
Come and go
Like a little brown child
And a dusky butterfly;
Come stay in my abode
I promise I’d make a worthy lover

Tangled and messed up
I wander rooms and corridors
Staring at pictures
With people squinting joy
Step in, they seem to say
There is enough sunshine
For all of us

My little tabby
Sometimes follows me
On these nightly excursions;
Woman and pet
Together we sit
Bride and best man
Waiting for you
To pluck me away
From these rosette skies.