list of night-time wishes

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Diary of a girl on a cold June night, awake: undreaming, uncomforted. Lying in her day-dress with a sickness somewhere, unplaced, because she slept through the afternoon and is paying for it now.

Everyone knows that sickness is a euphemism for madness. She thinks it lingers in the hare that lies limp in her arms, and then she knows that it isn’t in the hare but at her throat, strangling. She makes herself breathe, slow, cautious like she can’t remember how.

The girl makes a list of wishes to give the night. This is the purpose of Night — for rummaging about in your heart while nothing else can see or hear you, dredging out confession that retreats to silence under the light. It is hard to pretend in darkness. It is the loneliest place on earth.

.⁺₊ 𝔞 𝔩𝔦𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔤𝔶 𝔬𝔣 𝔭𝔯𝔞𝔶𝔢𝔯𝔰, 𝔴𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔢𝔰, 𝔯𝔢𝔮𝔲𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔰 𝔱𝔬 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔑𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱 ₊˚.⁺₊

♱ dear Night, I want to be a real girl and I don’t know how. It’s my first time being human-like and I am afraid and forgetting how I stitched myself together in the first place.

I was a good doll-maker but I am coming back apart now. I want to be rescued, salvaged and made lovely again in the hospital. I never brush my hair, so it is always tangled. I wish to have hair pin-straight and shining, and to have someone to brush it. I know I have read too many tales of living dolls. It is still my wish.

♱ dear Night, I want to bleed real blood. The edges of myself are leaking out: vapour, condensed milk, rosewater, ditchwater. I want to prove that this is real flesh, tender, vital and solid. I sat blind in my lover’s kitchen and tried to cut myself open so I could remember I lived in this animal-casing, doll-body not hollow or porcelain but stuffed with red organs.

♱ I ask you, Night, who is God, who is the Moon hiding behind my curtains while I am too frightened and too passive to rise and look, if I am a machine with a ghost inside me, or if I am a ghost rattling inside the machine. No answer yet.

♱ Here is a secret: I won’t miss anyone who abandoned me. I say it aloud so it has to come true. It is infantile but I need to believe it. I am fifteen again, deciding I could not be lonely because I was never alone; here I was, my twinned, uncanny self, ever-present, mimicking company.

I lie when I say I would make a good anchoress, all entombed and apart from the living. I would go mad in a week. Loneliness cannibalises you.

♱ I want to meet an angel, please. I want to be so afraid that I wake up from my somnambulism and learn how to pray properly. I am tired of vanity.

My one wish as a child was to be pretty. If I was pretty my life would be good, I would be liked and solitude would be starved all away. Now I just want to live in myself, to be witness to my own perceptions without first asking the voyeur lurking at the back of my skull. I know this is also a lie.

♱ I want to meet an angel. I want to be at peace. I want to be lifted into the arms of something tall and gentle and winged, like my father carrying me to bed when I was small, and told it is all going to be okay.

June should not be dark like this. Something is coming to an end. I hope when the angels come they still say, Do Not Be Afraid, and I hope that they forgive us. That is my last request to the Night.

I am going to try and sleep now. I wish you, my sweet insomniac self, kind dreams, of a white elk and a stream shallow enough to pick up stones from the bottom. I wish that you wake up and the world is glowing as softly as a pearl in a shell, and that you are well again.

𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔩𝔬𝔳𝔢,