Drabble 185 – Hypnopompic

This morning I opened my fridge to see several bowls full of summer fruit, and this brought me an almost unbelievable amount of joy. The past few months have been uniquely difficult and I’ve struggled to maintain anything like a healthy attitude throughout separation from my friends and family. I’m not, I’ve learned, a person particularly good at regulating her moods. I see a piece of bad news and I look for more bad news to confirm that I should actually be feeling bad.

I have to put faith in the capacity of the world to change. If I tell myself it won’t, that gives me an excuse to sit out. If I tell myself that it not only can, but it must, I can’t let it go. But there’s always a dark part of me that insists nothing I do has value, that nothing anyone does has value, because the forces we seek to overcome are vastly more powerful than we can hope to be.

I know that’s not true, but it still drags me down as surely as stones in my pockets. Sometimes I feel like I’m removing a few stones and replacing them several times per day. Today I saw summer fruit and that was enough to take some stones out of my pockets; a small, small victory that I will celebrate.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

HYPNOPOMPIC

(adj.) from Greek hypnos for “sleep” and pompe, for “sending away”

The state between sleeping and waking.

Anything can happen at twilight. Not just in the Instagram-worthy summer-scented sense—that magical time of first kisses, poor decision-making, sips of strawberry-flavored vodka—in the literal sense. Charlie has felt it. The hum of electricity, the buzz of power rising up from somewhere inside, or maybe beneath, or maybe all around.

Twilight is a between-time, and magic lives in between-times. She isn’t tired, but she closes her eyes, envisioning things shifting, changing forever. As she drifts off to sleep, she feels it—the crackle, the rise of hair on her arms that says something is different, even if she doesn’t know what.