Dark so soon! Night folds around the world like an envelope. Without light, there are only smells: the smell of burning peat, damp earth, canal water. Time to retreat, into books, toward hearth fires, warmed by hot whiskeys among confidantes in friendly quiet pubs.

//

Daragh is away a lot of the time. I'm used to it. I watch the shows and movies that he does not like, and eat the food he cannot bear. I take up most of the bed, surrounded by newspapers and books, scribbling in my diary and listening to the radio I've brought into the bedroom, only to fall asleep to the sad music of my 20s, as if I was a dreamy-eyed ne'er-do-well squatting in an attic somewhere in Berkeley.

But it's an illusion, that girl, someone I am occupying only for an hour or two before unconsciousness. Is it for nostalgia's sake? Perhaps, and relief as well, for I am not that girl anymore, but older and hardier, alive to the gloom and dazzle of the present, receptive to the possibilities of maturing love. Sure, I get overwhelmed at times, I find it so much, the world; but that overwhelming feeling might just be a symptom of being human in capitalist modernity.

Anyways, it's nice to revisit old ways, to find that they suit, if only for a hour, a lovely hour, of idleness, solitary play, and poetry only yourself will ever know.

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