A Little, Too Little

Still Leonard refuses to go into the yard alone when it is dark – which is pretty much always these days. I think he’s afraid of the hedgehog that lives in the holly hedge. He has to pass that corner before the yard opens up facing the road – and the streetlights. I think I have heard the little motorboat sounds from the hedge myself.

There are creatures that claim the dark corners. And what is mildly absurd in the daylight begins on an ominous warping at dusk.

The second day of the year, and already back to routine. The alarm simultaneously familiar and strange, after only two weeks of silence.  I drag my yoga mat into the hallway and ease into a forward bend. My left hamstring is one of these absurd creatures, threatening with an inaudible motorboat sound of its own. Two weeks of rest and distraction. A shifted attention, and a little – too little – easing of tension. There is still a threat here, too. An internal ambivalence.

My life is not that hard. But it is. It is mornings like this that inspire me to imagine a cast of gods – moody and arbitrary – throwing popcorn at the screen on which they watch me moving through this world. It’s all so very silly.