Head shaved and showered close to clean the lights went out again. Lit by the dim glow of an old battery powered emergency light, a blue apparition staring through the shower door from across the room, I continued my ablutions staring into the suddenly impenetrable shadows in the corner of the stall. They gathered and thickened, awakened to my attention, playing the abyss that stares back. I turned beneath the spilling water, brooks and rivulets slithering down my chest and shoulders, spattering off my back. I dried off in the warm, dark room, then opened the bathroom door. I stepped out in the hall, naked in the unadorned dark.
That was the second blackout of the day, and it barely lasted half an hour. The earlier one that day lasted from something like 7:30am to around 2pm; both were little more than inconveniences, closed refrigerators and reset clocks. The heat wave landed hard and stomped around a while. It flattened all us beasts a bit, giving only the ectotherms a boost. As I paced the property this afternoon flies lit from every surface in numbers that’d make Beezlebub reconsider his dominion. The dogs and cats are draped all over the property, holing up wherever the shadows gather and the surface cools. I fill up the water buckets and bowls, doing what little I can. Like me, it isn’t much; like me, it’s not nearly enough.
Despite my depression and volatility, despite my intermittent death drives and nearly daily suicidal ideation, I know life is precious. It is a brief fleeting glimmer in the vast impassive devouring, as energy takes a nap and space wanders away from the group. This ancient scintillation, from the early oceans to the first earths, is our common inheritance. The million iterations of living that we are a late fruiting from all seethe and dance around and through us. I am a colony of intentions and happenstance that will outlive me and my species, part of the earth’s scabbed over mantle, the myriad of mouths that aspire to eat the sun. All our middens and bowers built upon drives that existed before we are here, drives that will squirm and soar in a million different shapes and skins long past our expiration date. Our one true divine soul the dust we shall succumb to, my life a flicker already all but extinguished. Until the lights go out, the eyes drive on.
