The hours of the light, the hours of the dark
By Victoria Caceres

　　The hours of the light

　　The divine hours of light prevent her from the alluring isolation. The faraway island of her body gets entwined with the rustle against other flesh, fabrics, odors; it gets protected by erratic eyes, enveloped by light grazes...

　　Yet the hours of the dark are there, sneering at her from the prompt dive of the sunlight.

　　She opens her eyes to the sun streaming through the glass and the clock starts ticking. It is so numbing to be cuddled by the light all day. Wrapped. Tucked in. She may wander along the streets, venture among people, colours are solid, the air transparent, shapes end in a clear contour, words come out of her mouth and convey a specific, straightforward meaning.

　　No harm, no erratic misfortune, no sinister abyss beckons to her, nobody whispers in her ear about the mystifying yet enthralling roads of the nights. Entering the milky routine is like flipping a switch. Everything starts parading in front of her in a hygienic order.

　　Dealing with solid, three-dimensional beings eases up the way to diverting from the approaching obscurity. By the time she clocks out, the sun is diving into the horizon, behind the high-rises.

　　She swiftly collects her dispersed items and thrusts them into her bag, bandages herself in her autumn layers of thick clothes and heads home.

　　Long ago she tried postponing that instant of crossing the threshold of her flat to see every single object in the position she had left them when it was daylight, now opaque under the fluorescent light bulb. Eventually, she found out she was just feeding her anxiety while wasting time on activities she couldn?t be bothered. The other people could do nothing once darkness settled in.

　　The hours of the dark

　　The peregrination till the night takes always the same twisted yet ineluctable path. Shadows creep and spread and conquer every void and surface, including the soul. Including the mind, including every single body.

　　The Moebius strip turns everything inside out.

　　The dark has a slippery edge, alluring, rich when offering blank, quiet, closed dreams. Soft bunks with spongy linen.

　　The dark is a fast river, glowing under the stars, deceitful and enchanting, ready to set sail with her most obscure desires, the ones of the flesh, the ones of the soul, the ones she can't willingly face.

　　The dark claims her, over and over, with a foamy breeze, a silk embrace, a promise of unlimited unconsciousness. The hours of the dark have a melodious voice.

　　The darkness claims first its night empire in the corners of the rooms, in the erosion of the shadows of the light.

　　When she settles at home, so do the hours of the dark. They have shared their lives together, she should consider them allies and yet, there is the shivering of cold or fear or crazy, untamed love.

　　She remains indecisive facing the nightly ordeal. This might?be the last time she has remembered being awake. These odds provoke the usual yet still fresh hope, amazement and paralyzing horror.

　　A route of demons precedes the tunnel of full sleep as darkness demands total surrender.

　　The corrosive darkness wears down the hours. She can feel the obscurity holding to her skin, grasping it. It?s time to slip into the bed linen, to quit struggling. She is alone, no eyes on her, no extra bodies nearby, no witnesses for her nightly journey.

　　It is her other self, the negative of the photo, who unwinds along the dark hours across the off-beaten track she doesn't dare explore in the hours of the light. The adventurous self she has built secretly since her childhood stories of pirates and detectives, the one she hasn?t had the courage to reveal to the world.

　　Who will she meet on the other side? The characters over there have a routine of appearing and disappearing erratically. Some she enjoys, some she dreads. Yet, there are not only shadows in her dreams. Mostly, she lives the adventures with the carefree spirit she hides in the core of herself. Whether there are landscapes in green and blue or mazes in the deepest silence, she always wakes up with a sense of life renewed.

　　Yet, a slither of death is the price to navigate the hours of the dark. Losing consciousness is just a step away from dying. Her awareness of the process grows in her like the bark of an old tree, and now it is a whisper in her mind each time she closes her eyes and the clock halts until the next sun.

　　The characters in her dreams may be Picassos or Matisses, their faces splattered like the fragments of a broken mirror, or the dancing shades of skins, melting flesh, sparkling eyes flowing like a gleaming stream.

　　She can?t be certain whether she will be back from the dreams. Each time she closes her eyes, signaling the hours of the dark that she surrenders completely, she doesn't own her body or her movements or her destiny any longer. She may well stay forever in this foggy land, where there are actually no clocks, no constraints and no paths.

　　Since the opposite of "home" is not "homeless" but perhaps "new land"…

　　The soul robbed by the hours of the light is restored in the hours of the dark.