I woke up late this morning and missed the sunrise.  I’m sitting down by the pier, watching diving birds disappear into the tesselate mirror of the sea, one after another, like pacifist kamikaze pilots who want to venture alone into the after.  Some return with the wriggling slivers of fish snared between their beaks.  Others never draw breath again, floating indefinitely with spread wings along the current as their feathers rot away into the sea.  Some never rise from the agitated belly of the bay, but remain held in their liquid tomb with all that is vanished and sucked down into oblivion, their secrets hidden away inside them.  The sky is a lattice of grey and the water a plane of sheet metal at night under a torrent of rain and anaemic streetlight.  The wind whispers low over the surface of the ocean and its flotilla of steel shavings, its drift of paint chips scraped from an unseen dawn where birdsong fluctuates and merges with the ashes of what can only burn in darkness, what can only find light against its absence.  

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A paling rainbow quivers at the edge of the bay like a warped javelin cast by some deity grown weary of the muted palette they’ve spread over the face of the earth, until apathy pours over the edges and drips into the fathomless pool of what remains on the outside, inaccessible to us, filling the liminal sphere of our dreams with what we must purge from ourselves so we can find the beauty in our waking life, draw it into ourselves as a breath of colour, fasten it around our shoulders as a robe of pealing light – only to find ourselves cold and shivering and the garment shrunk, vanished inside itself as a tide of ennui floods back through the veins of our experience, tinging everything utterly neutral as the god who cast the rainbow into the steel-blue waters forgets why they ever attempted to go against their previous decree of indifference, forgets what it was they’d been aiming for and what they’d hoped to achieve by finding their mark.  All that remains is the wound of that momentary impalement in the memories of those who witnessed the impact and saw the pastel curtain of their lives parted for long enough they could recognise the beauty that lay behind, beneath, within.  

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Sometimes I think life is just an endless series of curtains being drawn back and forth across our field of vision.  On occasion, we might be lucky enough to glimpse something new, only for it to be inevitably snatched away as a nearer curtain we know as intimately as our own shortcomings rushes back over our eyes and dampens the tracings of that previously unseen colour, and the shape of the curtain that held it, as it dances itself out on our retinas.  The rainbow is veiled by grey and your absence beside me on the pier is so heavy I can almost see the stone sagging beneath its weight.  I don’t know why but when I missed the sunrise this morning it felt like it might be the last one, like I might never get the chance to see another, even though you’re the one who will never see the sun slather its light over the cresting waves again, and watch the diving birds go into the place we can’t follow, the place I can’t bring myself to follow you.  

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I woke up late this morning.  The alarm never went off and I kept dreaming about your expressionless face staring up at me from beneath a sheen of limpid water, kept trying to interpret feelings that weren’t there.  It was like you were sleeping inside yourself and your secrets were sleeping too and the water’s surface was impenetrable and the only eyes that could glimpse the relics of this world’s dormant beauty were somehow drowned and asleep and unreachable, and then I was awake and the sky and the water were of metal and I was too late to be there with you, where you rest now, eternally, waiting for the sun to live and die in all its celestial glory, until grey curtains of cloud are drawn back across the bay and all hope is extinguished.  

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The gulls here are raucous and insatiable.  The diving birds bore holes in the sea and are swallowed up.  Waves break and reform.  The sun resides somewhere behind the clouds, biding its time.  You are sitting here beside me, in the place you loved most, but for some reason I can’t see you describing the arcs of the gulls in the air with your fingers, or hear you laughing at the absurd gait of the waders foraging for crustaceans in the harbour at low tide.  

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My alarm never went off this morning.  

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I woke up late and missed the sunrise.  

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Somehow it feels like I will never see another, like somewhere there’s another pier where you wait for me, wondering where it is I’ve run off to, leaving you alone in anticipation of a dawn that will never arrive.