Midnight Reverie in Blue Light

Coffee and Klonopin and indica on a Saturday night at your mother’s house, where the air smells faintly of old upholstery and the ghost of meals cooked decades ago. She’s nearly 80 now, her mind like a tide that goes out further each time, taking pieces of her with it, leaving behind strange collections of seashell memories—some bright, some broken, some that don’t seem to belong to her at all. You watch her like a lighthouse keeper, making sure she doesn’t drift too far into the fog.  

The television mutters its endless forensic dirge, *CSI* reruns rolling through the screen like an old jukebox playing only one song. You wonder if it makes her feel like it’s 2003 again, like she’ll blink and the years will snap back into place, the dead staying dead, the lost un-lost. Maybe it helps. Maybe it’s just noise. But for a little while, she’s settled, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl waiting to be called on.  

You make your art here, in the margins of the night, in the dull blue glow of a TV that’s seen more deaths than most coroners. The old desk in the corner is cluttered with your scraps—half-formed ideas, sketches that might become something, words scrawled in a fit of inspiration or exhaustion, who knows which. The coffee in your cup is bitter, the Klonopin hums under your skin, the weed wraps around your ribs like an old, lazy cat. No more booze—not since you saw too many nights dissolve into black water, waking up feeling like a piece of driftwood washed up on a shore you didn’t recognize.  

Midnight comes soft-footed, stretching itself across the floor like a long shadow. Your brain is both heavy and electric, pulling in every sound, every flicker of light, every whisper of memory in the room. Maybe you’re some kind of millennial Burroughs, stitching together moments with caffeine and pharmaceuticals, weaving the strange, sad, beautiful mess of it all into something worth holding onto. Or maybe it’s just another night, long and slow and vanishing before you can get your hands around it.  

Who cares?