a brief ode to shorter days and longer nights

if you'll allow me

I've been feeling weird recently. Not sleeping very well. Whenever I go online, which is all the time, I see things that make me want to scream, but I don’t want to scare anyone, so I keep the screams to myself. It's been raining a lot, and although I love the rain, it's kept me from my little walks, which are one of the only things that make me feel even an approximation of sane. 

Based on the chaos that is my inbox, I assume many of you have been feeling similarly. 

You'd think that I'd add the end of daylight savings to my list of grievances, but the thing is, I've always enjoyed earlier sunsets. Apologies for being a "look at the moon" sort of person in this day and age, but I feel more myself when the days are shorter and I have more time to reflect. Luckily for my aggressive journaling habit, reflecting is kind of a big thing for me.

Like, sorry, but do you know how much nicer a lot of places look by starlight rather than daylight? (Taken in Matera, December 2023)

Because mornings are nice, but to me there is something very reassuring about evenings. An acknowledgment, perhaps, that we've made it through another day and can now ease into the next, with whatever hope and expectation we might have for it. Days are, by design, draining. I find it difficult to relax in the daytime. Night's arrival tells me I've survived, that an end can be a kind of beginning, too.

Earlier today, I was texting a friend who asked me how I was finding my new home, and I told her that I loved it, but I hadn't realized just how settled into my routines I had become ever since the pandemic. I've always been more of an introvert, and I really leaned into it in 2020, first by necessity and then by force of unshakeable habit. I'm happier here, less anxious, but being in a new place has emphasized how comfortable I've become in relative isolation. As it turns out, I need to see people outside of a screen to convince myself that what I'm living is a life.

The good thing is that, for the next few months, nights will be long. So most evenings, I put my phone on do not disturb and go for a leisurely walk. Sometimes I listen to a playlist, but more often an album, something familiar with a beginning and an end. It helps to see other people doing the same, easing into the comfort of nighttime: walking home from work, heading to dinner with friends, grabbing a drink, stopping by the pharmacy, the supermarket, the bookstore.

The cultural catholic in me is, against all odds, strong: I see a statue in the middle of a piazza at sunset and am, unfortunately, instantly transformed.

There's a sense of finality on winter days that escapes me in the spring and summer, when life feels a little bit like a marathon of forced, blinding light, and stopping for a breath seems like giving up. Election season has felt a little bit like that, too. 

But it’s nice to take a breath. Shorter days give me space to do that.

It's also possible that I'm thinking about nights so much because of this song I heard for the first time on Sunday. 

I've since listened to it dozens of times. Lidia Solomon's voice is breathtaking and I hope she has an album in the works.

All this to say: do not allow a longer night to cast you unto despair. Remember that it is only darkness, not the end.

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