The Same Waning Moon

 

I walked. The day was bleeding into itself, the sun a bruise spreading across the edge of things—darkening certain clouds, certain tree-crowns gilded like teeth, while the rest of the world held its breath in shadow. The sky still held that particular blue of stubborn daylight, the blue that refuses to admit it's dying. And there—already stealing the show—the moon. Thin as a fingernail. Curved like the crescent of accusation.

Like the one Anne Sexton saw. The one she named, claimed, made into something that could reach across time and touch another woman's loneliness. How strange, how terrifying, that her word and mine can be twins—the same forlorn arc of silver, the same witness to my particular despair. Decades between us and yet we are both here, looking up at the same waning moon, recognizing ourselves in its emptiness.

That is the real magic. Not sentiment. Not nature dressed up in Sunday clothes. But this: the way a woman's eye, sharpened by suffering, can cut through time itself and find another woman standing in the identical darkness, seeing the identical nothing, and make it mean something.

The edges of night. The quiet walk along the border between light and the nothing-after. I am there now. I have always been there. I will always be there, walking toward that thin fingernail, that sliver of proof that I existed when it was too dark to be sure.