night light
A thousand little entropies leading to the big and final entropy, and each time we are growing further and further away from something we once had and will never have again, our bodies becoming more and more like ghosts that ache and bleed and will inevitably fail us when the time comes, and oh, the time will come. Casting light on the fields at night, when even the moon is too shy to come out and play, green reflections from rabbit eyes and the horizon is too far too far away to see, the ground too flat and too swallowed by gloom to be anything but endless. I think about growing things as though it means anything at all, but when my knees are in the dirt, and the dirt is so dry that it feels like nothing could ever grow here, parched and barren and little more than dust to my fingertips as I splay my palm and worry the soil in the hopes of sparking something deep within the roots of the earth, as though there’s a prayer I can send somewhere for rain, the stubs that were once corn chopped to only inches high and broken underfoot with the kind of crunch usually reserved for bone.
If, maybe, there can be a moment when all is illuminated, and in that illumination, there can be peace found, knowledge that something is taking care of all of this, then, what? What am I supposed to do when there are too many stars to count, too much to know, to ever be known, and enlighten, enlighten, enlighten, let there be light, remember the promise as the frost settles in my hair and my skin shudders shivers soft and fragile little more than animal.
Forget how to breathe for a moment, throat tight, choked by how big and small everything is in a single heartbeat that lasts just a little too long and doesn’t settle quite right.
The train arrives and leaves two villages over and I hear and feel the rumble of it travel through the night, across miles until it reaches me, the only person awake and alive to know of it, and I am between spaces, always between spaces, trying to find what is real and what isn’t, collapsed like a newborn fawn that wasn’t strong enough to raise its head, abandoned in the dark and left left left and –
I am trying to find the glow. I am trying to find the one true thing. I am trying to end oblivion. I am trying to chew through the snare on my leg.
I am trying, I think, to outrun.
If the morning comes, then it is a beginning and an end and a moment that is eternal and gone in the blink of an eye, and to look at the sun is to burn my eyes, and so I look elsewhere, into the last dying embers of the night, and I whisper words in ancient tongues that sound more like howls and clasp them behind closed lips and the whine I make sounds feral and maybe that’s how it goes, maybe the world domesticates or makes rabid, maybe I will die curled on this patch of earth, maybe we all will.
Today is a tide that laps at eternity like a promise. And I cannot swim, but I hear drowning is just like falling asleep.
Charlotte Amelia Poe (they/them) is an autistic nonbinary author from England. Their first book, How To Be Autistic, was published in 2019. Their debut novel, The Language Of Dead Flowers, was published in September 2022. Their second memoir, Conversations With Monsters, will be published in June this year. Their poetry has been published internationally.
