Gray Day Theater

Late spring and the opening gasps of summer’s blazing promise bring whirling dark clouds, horizontal rain, fierce weather, warning horns, my blackness, horizontality, downright mean melancholy, and warning signs worthy of attention. I much prefer lazy storms that I can listen to at night in bed after I’ve closed my book (a defense mechanism so that the day doesn’t end and I’ll not have to live today again tomorrow). It’s neutral in that dark dark, my ears fine-tuning my mood, thunder a tympanic counterpoint to the forgetting I know is coming with the assistance of my nightly psychotropic, without which I don’t sleep, without which I descend into despair. My familiar, outside of me, sits patiently in the chair across the room, legs crossed casually, cigarette dangling from the first two fingers of his left hand, waiting for dawn, knowing that the overcast will return tomorrow, and I’m his again. During these shadowy times my dreams are the old ones of failure and inadequacy of such intensity that I force myself awake to make them stop, my pounding heart and short shallow breaths lingering. Oddly though, bright days don’t always bring an equivalent measure of pleasant dreams, say, pastures of flowers, faces I love, chocolate, tints of sweet colors. Instead there is nothing, and I wake knowing only that while I slept no psychic comedy played for me, no balance or compensation offered for the drama of gray day theater.