The things we notice now.

By Ella Dunnallen, April 18, 2020

Read time: 2 Mins

The things we notice now. Image

I am so familiar with my home now. I know how the sun never quite makes it into my room, but that I can watch, through my window, it’s journey throughout the day as it falls upon the trees. I know just how, when you stand on the fifth step of the staircase as something is baking, the smell is at its sweetest, and how that step is also the warmest place in the house. I know how, when you press the button for the front gate to open, it takes exactly four seconds for you to see it moving from the living room. I know exactly how the soft light licks the trees in the backyard, and how every afternoon at 4 o’clock, the sun from the window reflects against the big red painting in the hallway, bathing everything in a warm cherry light. 
All of these afternoons feel like sleepy afternoons now. Those afternoons when lunch feels so far away, yet dinner is an inconceivable thought. When everything is a little more pink and a little more yellow, and if you sat down to read a book there is no telling if you would stay awake. Those afternoons where, if you do fall asleep, you will always wake up just in time for dinner, and the light will be fading, and everything will be muted and dreamy. Like moving through honey while your favourite song plays from another room. 
I know exactly how the sky changes in these afternoons. How it begins, baby blue and bright, the horizon starting to dance in yellow. The colours of our backyard and the trees over at the neighbours house, intensifying and warming. How the yellow starts pale, and then grows deeper, gradually beginning to flirt with pink. Then quickly, everything is magenta and burnt orange, saturated and vivid, neon signs in the sky. And then it all vanishes, as quickly as it began, into the electric blue of the night. 
That period of splendour. It’s ephemeral. Short, transient, fleeting. It’s simply a transition from day into night, but every single person on Earth makes such a spectacle of it. If you squint hard enough, you can find metaphorical connotations in that. Maybe, everything is just a transition, from one thing to the next. Maybe those transitions are bright and bold and tumultuous, strange, illusory and dreamlike. But, when it comes down to it, they’re really just transitions. And the blue of the night will always come again. 
So yeah. These are the things we notice now. 

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