Headlights on the wall
Growing up, my room's windows were on the side of the house and caught the headlights coming up the street. The lights laced through slots in the blinds, yellow in the day and dark at night, and ran in pairs of slices left to right on the adjoining wall, starting at my old clock and crossing the top of the doorframe wood to the shelves further ahead. Most years, my bed faced that wall, and when I couldn't sleep, I'd do my best to ignore the clock — it felt loud — and watch the headlights.
I'd never noticed how the lights played in my room now until tonight. The neighborhood lost power, went black and quiet around midnight, before I'd shut the blinds. Closed, they kept out everything but siren lights. Open tonight, they gave ceiling patterns. I got parallelograms twisting when cars passed in the driveway. I got glowing when one went up the hill. I got a backward-rushing starfield when something else happened. In the minutes needed to sweat to sleep, when the field rushed, I couldn't break my eyes away to find what caused it.
Real not design, disconnected, running out of songs to sing to myself, the lights helped. Thought about moving again, to whatever place like in throwback verses was just my speed, a place hot and powered in between flash and outage, sending light through blinds I don't know.
