I remember the dark street, lit by the orange glow of
streetlights. The snow squeaks and groans under my feet. With my hands thrust
into my inadequate pockets, I look down, because looking up makes me cold. I am
alone, too tired to hurry, too cold to stop.
I remember,
tiredly daydreaming here on my bed. Sometimes I get up and stretch, bent, bowed
over my pillow, eyes covered by my hands. There are times when I could cry. My
body is weary, my mind even more so.
My every move is marked with it, drawn out with my want of rest. It is a deep,
bone-drained weariness that grips my soul as I sit here, head leaned back
against the wall. I tell myself that I cannot go on much longer.
I work on
sporadically, I suppose, listening to the same stale music, staring at a blank
page. How I would love to give in to the mindless amusement of Facebook, or
Youtube. My smiles would be tired ones, but they would be smiles. But then the
weight of my work would descend even harder than before, crashing through my
mind, dulling it.
Writer’s block.
I do it anyway.
Walking, I
dare to look up. The cold, infinite blackness of space looks back. I sometimes
feel the sucking of space as it steals the warmth from my body. Our pitiful
attempts, our stampings and our wrappings, to stay warm are met with ultimate
entropy, the cold, dark emptiness that surrounds us. I sometimes wonder that I
don’t get sucked out into space with along with the heat, dispersed into
nothingness.
The music
on my laptop plays on, filling my mind with something that it can hold onto. It
runs and reruns in my mind thoughtlessly, wearily. I don’t know why I listen to
music while working. My thoughts are pushed away by lyrics, fading out into
lost memory. Coherence is almost impossible to maintain. But I am so tired, so
bone-dead. I need something to keep me alive.
I see the
stars. One by one, they come back to me.
“Look,
there’s the Big Dipper” I say to myself, thoughts connecting in a linear
fashion. “And there’s the North Star, because the two last stars that make the
Dipper’s dipper point towards it”. Perhaps I turn around and say to myself
“There’s Orion, and there’s Taurus, because the three stars of Orion’s belt
point towards Taurus’ eye. Wow, look how bright Taurus’ eye is. And there are
the Pleiades on his back.” Taurus simply leers at me with his bright eye. I
realize I don’t like him, and that I am cold. I look back down, and wonder why
I don’t feel comforted.
There is no
comfort for me in my bed. There is simply the realization that it’s 11 PM already,
and I need to sleep, and there is the apprehension of another dark morning at
6:30 AM. Sleep is a comfort to me, but it is one that is so little used, so
little profitable. It offers the opportunity to fade into nothingness, into
warmth, glorious warmth; glorious oblivion. But then I am brought back to the
reality of the black sky in the morning, the cold, the weariness. Another morning
and no sight of dawn. Another cold stamping and wrapping.
There is no star that shines on me, with a tail like a kite.
There is no star both warm and bright.
Not a star in sight.
No warmth. No light.
Twisting and turning, I search for
that star, growing colder, hands out of my pockets. Is it anywhere to be found?
Where are you?
Light pollution.
Here on my bed, I am splayed. I
lean against the wall, head weakly turned towards my crucifix, bleeding out my
last Hail Marys while I drift off. I will fall asleep after the first decade or
so. The Rosary will fall from my hand, my prayers will end, my eyes will shut,
my body fall.
Tomorrow I will wake again.
Tomorrow, I will find my precious Rosary underneath my chest where I had fallen
the night before. I will pick it up again, loth to be parted from it. Weariness
will set in, again. Tomorrow, I will again venture into the cold to search the
stars. Tomorrow, I will look for the star with the tail like a kite. Tomorrow,
I will look for the light; Tomorrow, I will strive to keep the warmth. Again.
For I cannot help but hope for that
star, the heralding of dawn.
