Waking during the middle of the night is sometimes like finding yourself beamed down to a strange planet. A wholly dark and oddly quiet place.
Last night, rousing well after
midnight and in a stupor, I could not find my bearings at all as climbed from
bed and set forth. Staggering about, I
fought against what seemed double gravity.
With my arms outstretched against the black of night, I threaded through
an array of dark shapes hovering around me.
Doors in the wrong places. Walls rising
up against me.
And a stray thought suddenly surfaced
as I soldiered on: Why didn’t I like broccoli as a kid, considering how much
I crave it now?
After indeterminable wanderings
in the darkness, a familiar shape (something gray as opposed to black) appeared
before me.
This shape I knew!
Happy to a point of delirium, I
stumbled against the shape. Once there, I
blithely sprayed the wall, the floor, the seat, until finally correcting and delivering
a steady stream into the toilet. Lovely
and satisfying, this known place in a dark and untamed universe.
—Mitchell Hegman
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