It was something forgotten - like yesterday's bad weather, or the still, wet clothes in the washing machine, or the years that kept slowly, surely slipping away from me. It was those poorly lit days that produced the richest nights, so far as one could say that a light breakfast led to an excessive lunch. Our minds were stronger than our bodies. The mind had the ability to not let the body rest. But if you tired the body, the mind simply followed. And if you were there for the moon's slow increase to full, for the loud garbage men, the sound of beans grinding, the morning dew, and for those courageous early voices that lived in trees and sometimes perched on my window; you would ask: why have you never planted flowers? and I would say: why had some people chosen to sleep with the lights on?
Sleep was for people who had time to waste, but I wanted to be awake forever.
The moon appeared and the city died every night for a couple of hours when you could really hear the silence, and sometimes you believed that this is what it was all made for. During these lonely, barren hours that went deserted during the night, the city that cradled us, vanished, sinking into itself. It was easy to forget that other lives existed, that it wasn't just you and that big, white crescent thing up there which served as a better indicator of time than any old clock I knew.
And then the dawn, which came like springtime, like lawn sprinklers, like cavities - a surprise crawling at your shivering feet. Before you could catch the precise moment that darkness covered light, the sun slowly rose to illuminate all the cracks that were still in the pavement and it appeared like a king without a crown. People were waking. It was time to rise, to live again. But I hadn't slept, I hadn't died.
this is so beautiful simona.
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