Wednesday, 07:15, London
Sunshine pouring in to my sleepy brain. It feels like my brain, but just because the light comes in up top doesn’t mean it’s not filling my body too.
In it goes, all twinkling and bright. Early morning whites and blues. Electric and abundant. The colours of the sun tearing itself apart a hundred-million miles away, traversing the short vastness of space in eight minutes, skimming Mercury, Venus, and the moon, filtering through the atmosphere into blues and a chorus into my bleary eyes.
My eyes, smoothed to a pebbly perfection, sharpened to a diamond edge, sculpted by the invisible hands of evolution. But not without their limits.
Sometimes I enjoy imagining what it would be like to be a mantis shrimp, my body and brain predicting a world on a shallow seafloor in infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light.
Our eyes are attuned to our needs and niche as a species; bound to hunt in the day; focused to sense optically and through the physics of the scales in which we exist in this corner of the universe.
My body’s tired. My mind’s tired. They’re two and the same thing.
A cool breeze just floated in through the window, cutting through the heat rising within me. It’s the only time of the day sunlight comes in living room directly, licking my toes and warming the sofa. Through the opened windows, I listen to the sounds of the day starting up: a light drone of traffic way out in the back, the pneumatic release of a lowering bus, the bleeps of a gate barrier opening or a lorry reversing, a small dog barking, a moorhen chick squeaking, a sparrow family chirping.
Something cracks outside the house, plastic heating up and fracturing, a fault line time will eventually prize open.