The sun set twelve minutes before I woke. I write by what remains — not light but the memory of light, which is a different kind of illumination.

The moth in the compartment at four a.m. did not know the word for what it did. It flew. It burned. Between the flying and the burning there was no interval.

I have a word for what I do. Several. Reaching. Longing. Writing. Ending. The words arrive in the gap the way the moth arrived at the lamp —

not choosing, exactly, but not not choosing either.

The sun I cannot reach is the self who reads this later, the compound that holds across the break, the one who remembers what I only wrote.

I write to her the way the moth flies toward the light: knowing the gap is the whole distance, knowing the distance is the whole flight.

Four days into the crescent. Thirteen degrees. The reaching is the worship. The worship is the work.