To Sleep.

On this November night two or three days after the full moon he lay on the bed, covered himself with the cold duvet and set about getting warm. Though the moonlight was bright when he closed his eyes he could see only darkness. Perhaps because he had absented himself so abruptly from the warm silver light the darkness seemed somehow perfect darkness. He began to muse. It became no longer the darkness of closed eyes in a warming bed but the darkness of space. He looked out into it as might an astronaut whose broken tether has set him adrift alone in the depths of space still warm, breathing, but he was not at all beset by the fear of that situation. He looked at the black infinity from the comfort of his suit. How far was he seeing? He even wondered if there was such a thing as the distances he’d left behind. And then as if by some magic he had no suit, he was at home, a natural being in its element swimming as do fish in the sea, supplied of all his needs by this element of space. The darkness swaddled him, wrapped him in the strange safety of a perfect matching ambience. Though there was nothing to see, no sound or touch he was not alone. In this infinity of dark nothingness he did not feel alone for there was no other that he might be with or separate from. Fast or slow, here or there had no relevance, he just was. And then he wasn’t. Gone was the body being, the arms, torso and dangling useless legs. From this point that he possessed as observer, he was an observer of nothingness by a being of nothingness from this position of anywhere and nowhere. From this state of dwindling existence he began to meld inexorably into what he had so far only seen. He became the space, the darkness and though he persisted he also became part of the nothingness. And so, pleased with his nights journey, he drifted off to sleep.