Jen Koch

I live as much as I can in the half light.

I can’t think straight in bright rooms and on clear sunny days. I can’t sleep in complete darkness. The day leaves afterimages on my tired eyes, which play havoc with my PTSD.

Writing happens in the filtered gray gloom of the library research stacks, and in the dusk of an evening bedroom. I write in the morning, when I’ve had enough coffee. In the fall, in the stormlight of September and November. The Golden Hour – a brief time period in the evening adored by photographers everywhere – is a signal to my exhausted brain that now, it can take a fifteen-minute break from vigilance.

I work in a fluorescent jungle. I’ve asked for a lid on my cubicle. They thought I was joking.

Something is different; however, in the respective brain processes for design work and writing. Something about design pulls me forward, outside and past my anxiety and my stray thoughts. Would it betray me too much a hipster to reference Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transparent eyeball here?

Too bad.

I read Emerson’s essay Nature in junior high school, sandwiched between The Most Dangerous Game and excerpts from A Separate Peace. The essay, in turn, sandwiched in among my memories; compressed until all the good nutritious filling oozed together to a paste. To one turn of phrase: transparent eyeball; an entity devoid of self but for the work and the observation of the work. Professionals sometimes call it flow.

And writer me, reaching for words in the half light, would give a lot for flow. I sidle around this anxiety, my ferret mind alert and squirming with worries.

Writing used to be easier. But the flipside of all this is a new notice of light. My brain went rogue in the middle of an August afternoon. A year later, struggling to juggle another adrenaline rush and a thought process like a high-strung horse, I noticed the light. August afternoon light is the worst thing in the world, with its sharp edged cold shadows and dry sunbaked yellows. It’s horrid, when you’re me, with a blood-blurred, time-fogged memory as certain as a frightened horse. Demons lurk in the cool blue shadows sliding away from a midwestern August town.

It’s odd to think about how I hate August now, after twenty-odd years of ambivalence. Schoolkid me saw it alternately as another month of freedom, and the start of summer’s end. Me today, knuckles white on the wheel, sees mortality slouched against the hot brick of a Main Street convenience store. If I die, it’s probably gonna be in August.

November is better. Daylight Savings Time shifts the light, changing the shapes of the shadows I see from behind the wheel. More often, I catch the sun through canopies of glowing leaves. These are the last weeks of fall – but the ginkgo and the sugar maple have clung to their gilt scarves as if just for this. The bright yellow fans flicker like snow, pushed out of their branches at last by the impatient wind. I was born in June, but my soul remembers November first, with its long dry blues, streaks of orange and flashes of gold.

It’s in this time of year when my anxiety-soaked brain rests. The great sweeps of storms have gone, the barometer and thermometer march a slow descent to frost and snow. I can peel my whitened knuckles from the steering wheel, take a softer grip on all things, and savor the waning light.