DIARY
It’s 1:18 and I should be in bed.
As soon as I put my back down I’ll sleep dreamless until snapped awake at six or six-thirty. This is what the week is like.
But right now, steamy on the eighth floor, it’s hot and hazy. The plastic flower we hung over the arch to our kitchen months ago is still tilted down, unwilted, and black in the soft ruddy muffled from that dusty lamp we dragged in from the alley. Not a bad lamp, for that, though the shade’s a little worn, and the base is dusty on the milk crates. To my right, the physical space is outside. And the high-rises, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty stories wall up as if I’m blocked out in the middle of some huge city. Still, there’s a merciful wind dragging through, and fuzz from a dozen-or-so air vents times several hundred AC units scattered across the neighborhood. A grumble from Lake Shore Drive; all off to the right. And I can actually hear the lake’s slow groan, softer, coarser, and more consistant than the roar of traffic. On out through that window, the air is black.
Maybe it’s time for bed after all…