Against illusion

I have loved white and black since before I had the words for anything. Watch the morning happen. Light comes up and cuts into the dark, and for a second it doesn't look like the sun is rising. I feel it as though a wound opens across the sky, quick and without any softness to it. Now watch the evening happen. The light doesn't fade so much as get taken. Swallowed. Until there's nothing left of it anywhere, like it never existed at all. I have watched this happen every day of my life, and it's the only lesson I ever really trusted. What it taught me is simple, even if it took me years to say it simply. Everything that comes will leave. The light leaves every night and the dark leaves every morning, and neither one ever wins for good, they just take turns, over and over, and the only thing that never leaves is the taking of turns itself. That's the whole lesson. Nothing stays. The pattern stays. I built my life around that without really deciding to. White shirts. Black coats. Pale walls, dark floors. People probably think it's just a look I like. It isn't. Every morning when I get dressed I'm not really choosing clothes, I'm agreeing to something. The white against my skin is me admitting the day is going to wear me down by evening. The black over my shoulders at night is me admitting the dark is going to take me too, the same way it takes everything, and that I'm not going to fight it. It is so tender that if you sit with it long enough. A wedding dress is white. A funeral suit is black. For a long time I thought those were opposite things, but they're not, they're the same road looked at from either end. White is worn at the start because nobody knows yet what's coming. Black is worn at the end because by then there's nothing left to ask. Every beginning is a question. Every ending is the last answer, the one after which there's nothing more to say. I think this is why writing has always felt like the truest thing to me. Black letters on a white page. You can't read anything on a page that's all one color. It's only when the dark breaks into the light that a word appears, that a meaning appears. A life works the same way. Long white stretches of ordinary days, broken here and there by black marks, the grief, the love, the silence that changes everything. Take away the marks and there's nothing to read. Take away the white and there's nowhere to put them. I stopped waiting for another color to come along and make things easier. There isn't one. Red is just blood that hasn't dried yet. Blue is just the dark before it finishes getting dark. Every other color is a version of white or black caught halfway through changing into the other. I keep my house empty and my closet small because I don't want anything standing between me and this. I want to wake up into the white and know what it's asking of me. I want to fall asleep into the black and know what it's already taken. Even the moon does it right. Pale, circling around in the black of space, never once changing its clothes, never adding some other color to soften itself. Just white against black, the way it's always been. I'm trying to live like that too. Faithful to the first light and the last dark, and to whatever small, trembling thing gets written in the space in between.