(no subject)
When my eyes close, it is already morning. The sun slowly suffuses the city with a settling timidity of rediscovery, and because I cannot forget the heaviness of spending the night with obscurity, I cannot do the same. Instead, I heave my legs between the covers; I am coming home to a worn hiding place. The reaction of my bedroom against my body is memorized - there will always a corner for the unspeakable, my Father, thou knows how I have sinned. Drawing the blinds like an honest hand of cards, I fold my limbs into themselves, wondering if I am metaphorically relenting to the entanglement of days, wondering if my exposed spine will sustain itself if it also holds such honesty. Too many mornings begin this way.
Laying out my mistakes in the light is never the same process. This realization comes after watching the city awaken more often than I can bear to watch a person, this truth settles after living through days that collide into each other like nervous new lovers. These sentences run into themselves in the same way. I wring my hands together and observe as the light changes the nature of their interlacing, like the ebb and flow of what we mean to each other. Some days I understand. Each morning the rays that pass through where the body cannot are childlike, yielding and uncertain, but they narrate the past with a different tone than hindsight. It takes a willingness to adjust your eyes again, but the contrast eventually makes sense.
Maybe it is true that illumination brings clarity, but maybe instead what is forgotten is the lifetime spent in the darkness, dividing the responsibility by intuition alone. As if we had the ability to differentiate things in monochrome, as if nothing was tinted with our sense of self. At dawn I crawl between sheets so familiar they are skin, the smell of regret already there - salient and overwhelming - and in the ineffable gentleness of the morning I learn to divide differently, to stop carrying certain burdens. In the light I realize that if stuck in the same reoccurring, poignant hours, I would do everything I did again; a lifetime of not taking back what I did not do wrong. You, to whom I do not owe a goddamn thing. Know that I would not take back from you what I do not owe myself first. Know that in the morning eyes finally close out of serenity, not remorse. Know that this was learned the hard way.