I feel like I am becoming an owl. The night invigorates me. Its an inverse universe and I belong to it. I feel at ease in its vague shroud. The day time lets me see too much. The night air glosses over all the wrinkles, cracks in the pavement, and dead grass in the yard. She gives me instead beaconing lighthouses lining the sidewalks and strange, material winds that seem to wrap their hands around me like shy and passionate lovers. The night is my lover. She doesn't speak. She doesn't rely on plastic imagery and gaudy color. She doesn't explain herself before she acts upon me. She just takes me under her thick, nourishing wing and silently prods and licks and beckons and reveals. She doesn't know those baser senses. And she makes me forget about them myself for a little while. At least until I can no longer push through that thick, sweet night fuzz and drop to my grave for the scathing, scalping sun too soon to come.

Mourning comes. I wake up confused and longing, waiting for colors to fade, counting the hours until I can escape my muscles, and my skin, and the yellow of my hair, and everything else that wears me down.

-s