loss

I miss waking up early to go to work at the cafe. Sometimes it is the lingering night sky I most miss. Prior to dawn it sits dark blue and quiet, its dome dotted with half constellations that the city lights cannot completely hide. In his neighborhood the view is the best I have ever seen: humboldt park provides a respite from light and structures that gives an unobstructed view of the sky. Each time I have seen it, my breath catches in my chest and I wonder how it might be somewhere where the view is clearer and wider. I want that sky and that view. I want that night. I had it once on the cape, and there was nothing more perfect than that first time I saw the Milky Way.

The sky can change so much in a half hour, from dark to light and what I see above the buildings are glimpses of true beauty. Never the same dawn twice, I have seen the gradual lighting of a clear sky, one with clouds that looked like garland, one with clouds that held the light of the sun behind them. I once saw the sun rise on the one day of the year that it points due west, where it lined up precisely with the street the bus was travelling down so that it blinded us all and filled the bus with light.

I miss that sense of secret reverence between me and the day, as if I could be the one person alive in the world, as if I can feel the beating of the few things awake at that moment, a sense of calm and control, a sense that I have witnessed something few have.

In his arms, I tumble through wild dreams and tangled sheets and wake long after the sun has crept past the horizon.

I suppose that raw sensation of tiredness, that complete and ravaged feeling of being rundown is gone, but in its place I have lost some connection I had to the world, some intangible lie that kept purporting I was somehow special for bearing witness to the beginning of each day.