The light rises
The light rises across you and grows up walls and spreads over the city and pours into the ocean. The light and everything within it are silver at first and then the colours of things fade into themselves. They are familiar. Their wordless secrets return. A thermos warms in the light, a mug, folded plastic bags, a plate with crumbs pushed to its side, and a towel hanging over the back of a chair, tartan, bone, white, pale foam, colourless, all coloured by the sun. You reach out in it and feel your skirts rising. As it cascades back from the sea the light pushes you outward. You claw at the concrete, into dust and sprouting weeds to hold yourself down. The ceiling is pink dressed with dry grey mold. The sky is white. Your fingertips pull away from your nails, you pull away. The things are arriving east, arising into themselves with what recollections they can hold, a fingerprint, traces of saliva, a hair floating in tea. You fall back, turning with the light beneath you on the pavement, shadowless in the alcove under your grey skin. Things touch places forever. The light slides beneath them. They float on it.
How do you find the morning. It starts in you the fear again that it is going to fall away. The morning ruins you. Day sends your body into bits and each bit carries the fear. Do you scramble upward into it, slide into the stream, the tangible light pressing against your dress, fitting it to your skin and you fight to walk. Everything clusters around you. Every bit of you is bound by hundreds of cast off scraps and tokens. In the light you are undifferentiated. The things being themselves in the light ignites shivers of guilt when you consider them. Where had they been yesterday. The feeling is crushed beneath the weight of the things. You feel the weight of your limbs and all of the things tethered to them. You swing them away but they cannot move. You are lost. The moment when the light left you has passed. The alcove is in shade and filled with garbage. You gulp and suck air from the slender spaces between your limbs, filling your lungs to become buoyant to the day. You are upright and defervesced, rushing forward in the dim, wavering water lights the ceiling in shimmering golden nets. Rush forward with the tide away from the alcove and opening doors cracked ajar with their still blackness, the brown light waiting for afternoon. Evade the leaps forward in time that apartments capture. They sit in perpetual afternoon. The flood of light, solid as you wade into it, beyond the walls and edges and lines, breaks into droplets and disintegrates. You are white against the sky. Shuffle out of the tide and up the dusty sand on the dry brilliant beach.
