awning
Opening the front door when coming home at night, before the lights are switched on, I’ll notice my two cats first from their perch on the couch in the dim and ambient dark. Not their bodies, which I can’t make out, but their illuminated eyes. Behind their eyes. Their eyeshine, steady and observant and alert to what comes through. Four radiant orbs, held in suspension, seem to reflect a phantom light. I stop there at the threshold, in the dark. Eye contact. I’ll pause for a bit, before the lights go on, to see these four orbs steady and fixed and floating as distant planets in space, just as fixed on my position as I on theirs. I know who they are. I love them. I’m greeting them. And still, they are a mystery. This double movement of reception and loss at the threshold feels less like a place, but more like a condition. One of how to see without seeing, where darkness or misrecognition produces another kind of connection. Something else. I can switch the lights on and meet them again in another form, but with the residue of something other, now changed in me. Tomorrow, we’ll do it again, together.