The Arch

A monologue in two parts. Written somewhere in 2020

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This one is for wonderful doctor, engagement that never happened and hope he’s still alive.

I miss you. And I do not remember you. No name. No face. That’s a curse

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Every morning, I walk through the arch.
From darkness into light.
Not because I believe in light, but because I need to know it’s still there.

There was a time the whole universe was only shadow.
The Gods had no shape.
They played with barely-burning stars,
pushed off imaginary matter just to feel motion.
They were bored.
The era of wine-soaked melancholy was still billions of years away.

If we rewound the tape back to the first flicker I think we’d see it:
the idea of life.
Not meaning. Not morality. Just endurance.
A little body. A little human.
Something that could keep going.

They made one.
Then another.
Then the whole thing spun loose.

People spilled into the cosmos.
Too many. Too loud.
So the Gods built a container.
A garden.
An aquarium.
One green place to hold us.

Because the Gods don’t share well.

Time passed.
Land changed hands.
Bodies came and went.
The sun moved closer, then away.
Someone disappeared.
Someone was born.

And then one morning
an autumn one
I arrived.

I didn’t ask to.
No one asked me.

But I arrived anyway.
Fingertips humming with leftover starlight.
I saw what the Gods had abandoned.
I saw what humans built anyway.
Light.
Carved by hand.

I didn’t want to beg for it.
So I held the universe in my palms.
Walked through the prism.
Let the wave bend.
Let the particle split.

I filled myself with light.

And I knew

somewhere deep

one day, I would be the one

to give it back.

---

Every night, I walk through the arch again.
This time from light into dark.

There were nights I wanted to stay in the arms of particles.
But I couldn’t.
The rules won’t let me.
Streetlights are a lie.
A performance of safety.

The darkness doesn’t fear me.
It made me.

So I don’t resist.

My night is wrapped in thick curtains I stitched by hand, each pass of the needle splitting skin at my fingertips.

When I return to the beginning, the world shuts off.
There’s only dark. And it holds everything.

My fear.
My ache.
My joy.
My losses.
My tenderness.
My violence.

It is the cradle for my demons.
And for the twin who shared my mother’s womb.
He speaks to me.
Tells me to light another cigarette.
Says the glow will settle me.

And sometimes he’s right.

We talk.
I forget how to behave.
I do what the good girl wouldn’t.
Because I’m not her.

I’m the flicker.
The edge.
The one who knows

to give light you have to become the darkness that birthed it.

So those who carry only shadow
fall.
into despair
into me.

I don’t fight the dusk.
I don’t resist the night.

I let it live in me.

It feels like treason, like I’m selling off the light I once begged for.

It isn’t surrender.
It’s quite a strategy.

The only way to live beside darkness is to give it room.

You don’t conquer what you were born inside.

You hold it.

You let it speak.

You stop pretending it can be erased by will.

And so
I let it in.

Survival isn’t free.
Support the chaos that somehow makes sense

Truth is palatable —
just not polite.
I write it how it hurts.
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