Claire (de Lune)

My name is Claire, and I shower at night even though I don’t want to. Something about the fluorescent light, the dark window, the white tiles, it makes my skin feel too close to the bone. I tried, at first, to stay awake during the day, to shower and eat and everything while the sun was up. When it’s so bright outside you don’t even have to turn on the light, just keep the blinds up and let sunshine illuminate the bathroom, even through the fog and condensation on the glass - that’s when I like to shower best. But I work nights now, and eventually it was just too exhausting. I wake up when the sun is setting. I shower at night, even though I don’t want to.

    On my way to work I see others like me, people who work the graveyard shift and have forgotten the sun. I buy fruit from them, and ride the buses they drive. We all have this in common: a hunched, pinched demeanor, permanent frowns etched in granite, and heavy wool coats. I feel cold all the time now. It’s a pity the moon gives off no heat.

    Some people I work with keep space heaters going all the time, but I think it’s no use. The ceilings in the warehouse are too high; all the heat rises and swirls around in the rafters, keeping nobody warm. I keep my coat on through the night. I would wear gloves the whole time, if I could, but raw touch is essential to ceramics. So I pull my scarf up over my nose and ignore the numb pain in my fingers. Time passes slowly. 

    It’s the coat that gets me fired; or rather, Mendel’s obsession with my coat. He’s ribbed me a few times about my lack of mobility, the constraints on my form. I laughed with him and told him I would let up when the summer time came - then the nights are warm like mulled wine and humid as a greenhouse even without the sun - but he kept making comments and coming up with names for me and calling attention to every imperfection in my work, blaming them on my padded arms and swaddled face, and I think somebody must have heard something because suddenly it’s an hour into my shift and I’m being approached by my manager, I’m getting herded into his office, and I’m being fired.

    The tears on my face sting in the cold. I feel stupid for crying over such mean people and a terrible job, but I never like to get into trouble. Frustration and shame swim around behind my eyes. Maybe it would be smart to go back home and sleep, but my night has just begun - that is, my day - it would be like going to sleep after receiving a dishonorable discharge at 10 AM. Instead I drift into the streets like an ice floe. My coat seems even less effective out here, between the open-air stalls and alleyways. It may rain soon. Luckily there are plenty of white-tiled coffee shops open. There are bars, too, and I’m thinking about them already, but the longer I put that off the better. I order black coffee filled with caffeine to keep the thoughts of alcohol away, and then I spend some of my now finite, now dwindling amount of cash on eggs, bacon, hashbrowns - it’s morning time for me, remember?

    I wish this wasn’t my life. It’s too cold and too empty. My daydreams, the things I think about while I shiver and eat alone, are bright and warm and glamorous. Could I be someone else? Is it possible that one day I’ll be the type of person who owns a luxurious penthouse suite in the big city? I’d sunbathe in bikinis and drink champagne in the afternoons. I smile often and am loved. Sometimes I weekend in Europe - will I? Will I? I yank myself back to the present, where I’m buying a pack of cigarettes from an all night news stand next to a bus stop. It’s either the cold or the third cup of coffee that’s making me shiver - I guess either way I was hoping the cigarettes would help me there. It hits me that these plans only exist in my head, complete fiction, not real like the coffee, the tobacco, my blood, my hair. My stupid, thin coat that got me fired. I retreat again to my plans for an improved life.

    In truth I have always spent too much time thinking about the future. It might seem to make sense right now - I’m tweaking on a bus stop bench at two in the morning, it’s been a week since I was fired, still no job leads, really I’ve barely looked, I keep drinking this coffee instead - but even before, when I was employed and indoors all I thought about was what my life might look like in a month or two. And before then, months before, I still lived during the day, I rose with the sun and went to work with other daytime humans, I slept fully and soundly at night. But still, back then, if I got a faraway look in my eyes and you asked me what was on my mind, the answer would have been a future for me where everything was different. I wore sundresses that left my shoulders bare and I ate strawberries in the park - isn’t that the future I’m dreaming of now? Didn’t I already have it?  

    Now everything is only dark, all the time. When was the last time I saw the sun? I look up and there, still, is the moon. Every night for a month it’s been the same - I tried resetting my sleep schedule, I can’t, I sleep during the day and drift in the night - no sunshine, no warmth, only sick city streetlights and a pale, waning moon, which is on my mind often these days (nights). I dated an astronomer once who told me that a moon’s orbit can become unsynced. Slowly, it unravels like thread until it escapes its planet’s gravity and flies off into space, untethered. That’s me: Claire the Asteroid, Claire the Rogue Moon, drifting deeper into an ocean of cold black. I’m completely alone, out of sight from any star. Though in reality, while the moon is physically isolated in space, in the city my body can never be alone; instead it’s my mind which spirals into the ink with nobody near. That’s the problem with people: two entities, mind and body (three if you count the soul), with no promises that all the parts stay glued together. Maybe it isn’t Society’s Planet that Claire’s Moon has deserted, but rather Claire the Mind has unraveled from Claire the Body. Something degenerative and spiral-shaped happening inside her head while her body keeps up its normal orbit here on the ground. I hate that image, because it makes me feel even more alone than the asteroid, trapped inside myself without a way to voice my terror. 

    A drag from my cigarette rips me back to earth. I’m Claire the Person, metaphysically unified for now, sitting on a park bench that’s about to become my bed. It’s been many months now since I worked, or spoke. I was evicted yesterday. 

Inside me my breath grows short and rapid. I want to take all the water on earth and unify it into a single great sheet, many meters thick and miles wide, and crash it down on top of me. I am alone, and only such a volume of water - all of it, the oceans, the rivers, the deep seas, the lakes - can cleanse me of myself and wash away my life. Maybe it’s this obsession with water that’s led me to the riverbank for a week now. The sun glitters across its banks - yes, the sun, for eventually the eviction set me straight. On park benches the sun will not let you rest; it was a useless thing to fight against. My wandering takes place during the day now, so I must collapse in exhaustion at night, and this is what I have to say of daytime: it is too bright. Its rhythms of birds and traffic are too different from my cricket songs, the electric vibrations of midnight. From the banks I can see the bridge out of town, where sunlight glints on a hundred car hoods going back and forth, here and there, hello and goodbye. There’s more world out there, on the other side of the bridge, that I will never see. In the end all I have to do is keep walking. It’s cold, but I’m used to that by now. Don’t worry about me: from down here, the sky is dark, and the sun looks like the moon, and when I drift out to sleep the day feels like night time again.