It's pitch dark out, on a street with no lights, even through the heavy drapes. Living room's dimly lit as the familiar theme song lulls me back into sleep. i
jerk awake with the creaking of the house as it settles.
All of that dark, and what really sticks in the six-year-old's mind are the shifting clouds in the pink-orange sky as we walked to the car. The clouds, with any luck, would get kicked around by this amazing sort of wind, and you could almost hear Rocket Man in the background, almost see it being the middle of the day somewhere else, halfway around the world. In some office building in Tokyo or something. People click-clacking around the hallways with stacks of swishing papers, not having any clue what they're missing, the bottom-of-the-swimming-pool skies brushed clean by trees.
People who were once little kids, but didn't know what the dark looked like. Didn't remember. Didn't feel it.
Took the
skies for granted.