My head is pounding.
Is it the cheap wine? I drank so little, yet I am reeling and need to get out of bed. To what end? To what end do I arise and use the remaining portion of night's deepening darkness to no satisfactory or redeeming purpose? Padding with halting, unsteady steps toward the window, I draw back a panel of filmy curtain that offers neither privacy nor aesthetic enchantment to this stifling box of a so-called habitation. There is no glare of street lamps to cast frightening shadows of monsters that could exist only in my febrile mind. There is black only. Only black.
I am not afraid of the darkness but of an awakening light - come from nowhere - that, when cast upon night's hidden creatures, scares me. To bed, to bed again, to find ultimate security beneath down and cotton ...