Bright Bird Mornings

June 9th, 2023

June in the Pacific Northwest: the month when days are the longest, and so much of the night is too bright.

Is it my imagination, or is the moon brighter than it was when I was a kid, or even just twenty years ago? PAINFULLY bright … like staring at the sun. A reminder that’s what it truly is: SUNLIGHT bouncing back to us. Reminding us it we’re about to be penetrated to the point of blindness and subjected to inescapable heat.

I am afraid. We’re all on The Raft of the Medusa, in a burning hell of our own making with too many people fanning the flames … adding more fuel to the fire. People who literally would not piss on you — their neighbor — if you were on fire. Cannibals, bullies, and tyrants.

Four in the morning and the birds are SO LOUD. But it’s the time of the year where a lot of the birds have moved along to cooler pastures, so the variety of songs and birdcalls has diminished. Replaced by One. Shrill. Repeated. Warning. Like this one bird stayed behind to sound the alarm, and is only quiet for perhaps six hours per revolution. Over and over, through the smoky-fog, the unending bright blue light in all of its harsh near-solstice permutations, this bird repeats the the same shrill message and I can’t close the windows against it because it’s already too hot and stifling.

“Boundaries are not real”, people are saying, pointing to the wildfire smoke from Canada choking MORE PLACES THAN TREELESS NEW YORK CITY / MANHATTAN.

Right now the boundary between night and day feels unreal. Non-existent. A former figment of my imagination that I can’t pretend to believe in anymore.

Only a shadow of night remains, cast by the big bad sun’s rays, bouncing around the corner where AM meets PM. When I get up after midnight to pee I step outside in bare feet to catch it, wondering why nobody else seems to hear its rhythm, but grateful they are so willfully deaf I can still enjoy some semblance of privacy. Taking sun spots back into bed with me, laying face-down in my sooty pillow. Suffocating to block out the light.