There's a place that I now only get to see from behind my eyelids. A small craftsman. Nine months of the year, the doors and windows left open, and it smells like earth, sawdust, and the remnants of what was last cooked in the cast iron pan.

I used to lay in that house and feel my breath move with the elements; they crept into the house like a small creature foraging for food - cautious at first, but hungrier and more eager with each step. The apoptotic leaves would dance their dance of death across the room and vanish out the back door never to be seen again.

But for a few of those leaves, that house became their tomb. Their dance was a little heavy on the feet, and they trapped themselves under beds of lovemaking and slumber. With the weight of each trapped leaf, the house sank a little deeper into the earth, pulling me along with it into the vestigial respite of nature.

Maybe this is what a 'dream home' really is. Not the place I want while conscious, when demons whisper in my ear, but the refuge my mind seeks in weary sleep.

The sun inside is going out

How much has been lost to unnecessary self-sacrifice masquerading as extraordinary virtue?

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I understand it now
Our greatest mistake
The perfect world we make
Where you’re not there to pull me closer
And I'm not there to hold your hand
And we're not there to read them stories
Or scare the monsters away
Lives never given the chance to breathe
Oh, will this be our greatest mistake?

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Laying on her stomach, she turned her head to face her right. Her right arm slid down towards her hip, while her left slid under her, now extending right, bent just so at the elbow to create a cradle in which to rest her head and stare at her lover.

He laid on his right side - already facing her - with his knees curled up slightly. His elbows were tucked such that his hands loosely masked his face.

As she manipulated her body into its new position, her hand came impossibly close to his. These hands - all too familiar with the textures, ridges, and contours of the other - were unable to make contact. A barrier had formed between them, as insurmountable as the ocean that once drank the sun. To sail the centimeters from hand to hand would take spirit.

In that, he found himself lacking. Whatever part of him once constituted spirit had gone in search of that mysterious piece, and he lay...

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A difference.

When drunk, she steps on the cracks.

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With few exceptions, everything has a beginning. This one is for Nocturne Harrow—the author and the publication. It is the project of a deeply human author trying to reengage the deeply human. If Nocturne Harrow amounts to nothing more, it is my sincerest wish that it is remembered by someone, somewhere as a man's innervated attempt to put on his bravest face.

In recent months, I have been afflicted with a particularly pernicious condition—the kind that escapes easy definition and only comes into focus when the proper word-lenses that are close-but-not-quite-that are aligned. The French might call it "ennui;" the Ancient Greeks might call it "acedia;" men of the cloth might call it the "Noonday Demon;" and modern folk might blink their eyes vacantly and call it depression.

Last week, I visited my old Barnes & Noble - the same one that, many years ago, stocked my childhood shelf. I don't get to visit it much anymore. It had magic once—as a child, the stacks whispered their stories to me. At some point they stopped whispering—or I stopped listening. Instead of collecting stories I started collecting reliquaries. So it was no surprise that I soon found myself in the Classics section, where ‘special edition’ covers glitter seductively; they must know they are there to be seen and not heard.

I pulled a copy of The Sun Also Rises off the shelf, flipped it over in my hands, and saw the following on the back cover:

I suppose that gets as close as anything else. It begs a question to which Nocturne Harrow is at least a partial reply to.

Maybe the priests really do have the closest answer—I feel shadows, everywhere. One of them is mine. I'd like to get to know him better; I think he's tired and would like to rest for awhile.

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