It Happens In the Evening (audio)

Something haunting worked its way through me in the evening hours, perhaps it was the sun going down so much earlier than I realized it would. The harsh cold air clutched at the breast of the fiery horizon.

I was going about the little things you do as far off past the space and time we are used to the little stars begin their burning deaths high above the naked trees. Shadows crawling up the empty walls. It was a feeling more than anything else. A sensation which came unexpectedly and felt like it came from a place I have known far longer than my whole life. I knew it since the beginning, and before.

I sipped my wine and changed into comfortable clothes. My hair undone, falling in strawberry blonde cascades over my shoulders and down my back. I lit candles aglow against the blackened windows.

And I was measured. So, so measured, composed, as if almost brave. As if ready for whatever may come, though there was no way I could ever have known what that was. What it still may be or may become.

Underneath my steady skin I was pleading. I may have even prayed. I never pray so I cannot be sure, but I used to pray on command as a kid. It felt good and strange and hollow mostly. But on this particular night it felt necessary and sudden, the way I mentally, spiritually, crushingly threw myself at the feet of a thing which is bodyless, mindless, without beginning or end and without any answer of any kind to offer me.

I pleaded for something so deep to heal me. With its knowing, with its breathing, with its uncanny intuition. A disembodied thing. How behind my dark eyes, which saw everything in the room in grainy film like progression, the long linen curtains hanging like ghosts against the dim light, the slender brocade couch from my childhood home, I begged and pleaded with this thing to please fix me. Because I don’t even understand where I am broken.