I am writing to you from no-place
I am writing to you from no-place. The dark hours between waking and sleep. This time visits me at the trough of morning, before the scrape of birds upon the roof, before the sunrise like explosion across the harbour. I write wishing I were with you, wishing that the audacity and passion of text could infect those moments I spend with you. It is August. Around me, around this place, the imbecilic wind haunts, accelerating between buildings delivering some apocryphal message for thirty days and nights of this month. The air slows and a thin gauze of cloud unfurls, its silver pallor covers the sky, darkening, diminishing star-speck. Looking out into the streets, into the city, into distance, I look for the angels that walk among us not knowing whether they journey through the City of the Dead or through the living. I look for them hoping to see the penumbra of figures peering through the windows of my neighbours’ house inspecting each for some signpost or a familiar to deliver to them directions or instructions. Nothing appears no dark wing beats at the window and no coal black eyes. At this hour, in this no-place, nothing exists. Perhaps this wind, in its fury, has left an absence. The welter of leaf meal and seeds, of litter and dust, seems to have vanished. For a moment I am the last of things. But I know that this cannot be – you are sleeping. Drawing breath deeply from your stomach, your fingers curling through fabric clutching like the clumsy hands of a child at something that seems always beyond grasp. Your breath quickening, rising and falling. And at intervals the planing of one foot across the other. A near-silent portamento and the slow comfort of touch. I am dwelling too long in the shape of your body. The slow erosions of movement that curl your hair these nights have left fine spidery talismans across sheet and pillow beside the scribble of yesterday’s makeup. Even here, far from where you sleep, hours before you will wake (when perhaps you will finish a glass of water left from the previous night, throw open a window and examine the advancing hours, then pad quietly through still dark hallways only now illuminated by weak shafts of light and begin washing – the first of your small ceremonies this morning) I know what it must be like to lie beside you. There is little else to do at this hour. The distance between this time, between this place and the next differs whether I sleep or sit here and write. This distance between us is equally unpredictable. Despite a childhood of promised blood-red sunrises mornings begin with a small dot of light that gapes through the rest of the sky washing everything with painful alacrity. There is none of the possibility of the earlier hours. Morning presents itself naked and cold. With the light a pentimento, shapes and lines previously hidden in the darkness, and a return to normalcy. I am preparing myself a pot of tea. The sounds are of the boiling water, the neighbours’ dogs anxious to free themselves of their nightly burden trying to break from their yards, the click of bird-claw on the tin sheeting above my head and the occasional menace of sharpening beaks, engines grinding passengers up the street and ferry blasts. Three short sounds indicate reverse and the need for correction before turning back into the harbour.