I finished the first draft of an essay, and I'm not sure if it works. The husband says it's too academic—oh well!

Yesterday dandelion fluff floated in the courtyard, irradiated and spectral, which I first spotted in a mirror as I was writing in bed. I felt visited by nature, called to wander fields and woods. After dinner, I walked around town in the velvety dark, thinking of the eerily illuminated photos of trees a friend is taking during her night walks, exercises in noctambulism:

"Generally people noctambulise because they are in search of melancholy, or rather a particular type of imaginative melancholy. Franz Kafka wrote of feeling like a ghost among men – ‘weightless, boneless, bodiless’ – when he walked at night.”—Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

What was I doing out at night, as bats fed in the light of the full Scorpio moon? Escaping the mother-in-law, the barking dog, the telly's soporific visions. I brushed, or so I imagined, against the filaments of other people's dreams. Each step I took was transforming me into a different creature altogether, clad in a blue-black pelt, with talons and razor teeth the colour of moonlight.

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