“I am afraid of the dark and can never remember being free of the fear, but everyday, I go

through the motions of bravery. Lock away the night lights and sleeping pills, plan a walk after sunset, fling wide the curtains to watch dusk come in. Disrupt the madness. Thirty minutes and only terrestrial objects will be visible. I sit facing the picture window, the one I fell through Halloween night when I was a girl. I close my eyes and imagine the coastline in Oak Bluffs, the smell of the sea and dragonflies and sea salt, where I live serenely in a gothic cottage of blue. A horn blares, my eyes open. I’m in civil twilight, the generous one that still gives me enough light to see, but there is a problem in my throat, a familiar dread in the grooves of my tongue. I put my hands to my throat until I can swallow, then splay my fingers across my chest until my heart beats into nautical twilight, the dark one when there is no distinction between sea and sky. I think I see the moon. I see the moon. We, the moon and I, wait together in the gloaming, until astronomical twilight comes and fear dies under faint stars.”