Sleep

Sleep, what’s sleep? Those small absences in the midst of a long night. The surf broke on distant rocks. I have done my best to be cheerful. It is raining once again. I can’t seem to see any details. I scan the lawn, the sky, the table. But then I notice that “Ticket queues are due to depart” on the back of a train ticket, which means something completely different to me – not that there will no longer be any queues, but that a set of queues are heading off on their own designated rail journey. I imagine numerous long lines of patient travellers all preparing to board the train. Instead of a single queue there is a vertical array of queues, perhaps a bit uneven, since no two queues are identical. I wonder if all of this is sufficiently distant from whatever intimately concerns me, whatever cannot properly be spoken? Our weird and uncomfortable conversations, which bring phone conversations to a close and leave long lapses in texts.