Sleepless
With time comes storms.
We had no choice but to weather them.
Connection became almost impossible when completion was barely probable. We grew and our work grew with us. We realised the consequences of what we’d chosen, and yet, we stayed.
I don’t know if I would have stayed if I didn’t have you.
All of you neighbours, writers up against my walls, my historian and storysmith and journalist, too, helped my hours when the sun showed its face to feel more human. But when you all slept in proper diurnal fashion it was dark and quiet and heavy.
But my shining stars, my aurora of a home, you were there in those clouded nights.
Through it all few of us slept and fewer recovered. I remember the inky blackness melting into dawn more vividly than than sunlit spring days, then. (Though—saying I remember is perhaps an exaggeration at all, as the way we performed dangerous chronomancy on our bodies turned our days to blurs, parsed only by lone moments marked more strongly by colour and light and song than by date or hour or detail.)
In every hour that humanity should not see and every bleary sleep-muddled comment, you were there. The nights threatened to feel lonely but I was not alone. I never was. Someone was there or would be there. Nothing went unheard or unspoken.
Even at my darkest moments, I felt held. Could you imagine being cradled so surely?
Each moment I dared wish the sleep I begged for to pull me through the veil of time and space to somewhere else, I couldn’t will it. The love and courage of all of you tethered me too strongly to the reality I remain in. Thank you.
Can I somehow bottle up your shining golden resolve and care and take it with me? I know Time will wrestle it from my hands, but with my words I want to try, here, anyway.
You held me to this world and I’ll hold you in my heart and in the work of my hands.
