Night Owl

People always tell me

                                       Im a “Night owl”

(And I agree)

But I think it’s just because sometimes sunlight is distracting.

It bounces of my pupils, creating an ever-changing movie of emotions and shapes and colors and I can’t look away. Not now, when it burns my eyelids with outlines of slanted eyebrows and glaring eyes, pushes me into the spotlight, brightens my skeleton until everyone can see the spidering cracks and flaws. Not then, when it forces words to spill from my lips, materializing faux bandages on all my scars 
just so everyone thinks

 I’m nothing but perfect. 

It draws me away from myself, melts my melancholy thoughts and tints them with a warmth that belongs to the sun (not me) to make more material to fold around my fragile skin. Pushes everything out, out, outwards until I am empty inside.

It’s never just
 for me, though- 
the sunlight spreads that fabric, draws others in whether I like it or not, provides protection and creates ties (strands of my own hair) until I’m caught in a web of broken people and it hurts, hurts, hurts to pull away.
The sun deconstructs me and builds me back up until I am a mix of colors and no one (not even me) can tell what I am anymore. 

And sometimes it’s nice.
Sometimes it’s so, so nice to put on those suffocating robes and not focus on the rolling, shifting, toxic thoughts in my head, sometimes those clothes hold me up when my bones are finally giving way.


But then I sit in darkness, silent in a way only the night can be, and I remember the comfort of being able to drift through space and be everything and nothing at once, an anonymous bystander shrouded by weightless quiet. The lack of light gives me definition through its undefined-ness, letting loose shape and colors bleed from my uncovered scars like a perfect secret only me and the blackest sky to see.

I float, untethered (if just for a moment) from the tangled strings that hold me down to earth, relishing my undiluted existence, relishing the way that while sunlight touches colors (leaves them bright, bold, faded, calm, deep, dark), 
darkness doesn’t (could 
                          never) 
treat different 
my 
indecisive hues 
because 


(hidden away in perfect black)


no one 

can 

see 

them

anyway.