Carpentrix

What does the heart of night have to say? I used to fear that below the shadows were more shadows, a dark so dense its gravity, at some point, would grow inescapable. But the moon opens the night jar of the heart and inside, beneath the layers of fear and shame, lives another form of light. It does not glow like moonlight and it does not shine like sunlight. It is like no light any of us have seen with our eyes, a light like bells. When the moon draws out the shadows it can guide us to this light in the darkest center, in every heart pulse and in every pause that breaks the eternity of a sleepless night. There it is, this light, and it is—can I say it? Why this shame? This light, brave animal, can I say it? It’s love.

The Long Night Moon is rising, and “The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review.

The December has been dark. Morning is night. Afternoon is night. The sunsets at the close of the year are the best of the year, as though offering consolation, as though the sky says, I know it’s early, but here, these golds and pinks and lavenders, they’re the deepest I know how to make. Small consolation now, nothing seems to smooth the edges all the way, but I will take whatever passing approximation of comfort I can get.

Before, after.

It rained this morning. In the afternoon, the sun did its best to press through the thickness -- not clouds, it didn’t seem, more an extra layer, as though the sky had pulled a sheet over itself, like light was trying to shine through light. The sky was white-grey in the way December skies are white-grey and the sun, when it presses through, takes on a look more lunar, pale, like silver skin stretched across a loin.

I’d been crouching over a showerbed all morning, grouting tiles. My view was floorward. The room was warm and dim. I left the bathroom and walked into the livingroom we’d made with all the windows we’d put in and light was pouring through, magic, wet, post-winter-rain light. I gasped and gushed, look, oh my gosh, the light! The man whose house it is – whose life we’ve been a part of off and on for months now as the job has expanded and contracted, as we’ve cut holes into the side of his house, built new rooms, brought the light in – he sat on a couch in the corner. “I know, I know,” he said, “it’s beautiful.” We both looked out and looked how the light entered in. “My mother had an expression,” he said. “I don’t remember the Russian, but for light like this, she said the witch’s daughter is getting married.”

She was a proud bride today, with a supernatural glow.