clear skies, still chilled
I used to think I was a night owl. Maybe I actually am. I once read a study that said you are born one way, and it’s not worth fighting the way you are born. Instead, embrace it, care for it, understand it. Thrive.
Now that I’m coming around to thinking about it, I’m starting to doubt my late-night insomnia. Because what I actually like isn’t the numbers on the clock or the way my laptop screen illuminates the plaster walls in total darkness. It’s the quiet. Something about being awake, breathing in and slipping into the silences and equating myself to the plinking of rain outside my bedroom window. It feels secretive and forbidden and entirely mine. It’s about seizing agency when no one else is present to usurp my definitions or reject my philosophies. I think 4 am is my favorite.
This week has been what I call deceptive cold: an unlikely pairing of happy/sad visible in weather changes. It’s an illness about a crooked smile, like tawny sun against picked up ocean breezes. The deceptive cold swoons and crows and seduces, lulls you into false comfort, then abandons all together. Outward glances through sealed windows convince you that overhead is cloudless but such glances forget the grey-lavender sky and 40-degree dryness about the air. So the weather transcends, creeps, chills, and on these days, I continue trekking, gloved, scarved, and jacketed, waiting for better days of spring.