Melancholy Melafix-ed*

The balcony of my room overlooks the ponds my plecos live in. I know they come out at night. I wonder if it is solace my fish find in the night; thus why they can emerge from their hiding places and go about the usual business of eating in order to live on another day and continue their survival.

I usually like the night too for the refuge it provides; like an old knowing tree with calm shade to cover me while I conduct extraordinary business dealing in feelings. For in this darkness, in the shadows, everything lengthens in different measures - hours, dreams, worries and longings.

I wonder then about the difference between a nocturnal fish or animal, and me. It seems that my usage of the night is conflicted. On the one hand, I would like to indulge in my emotional states. Cry as much as I want to, dream forever if I could, stay as transported as I can because the night is a highway. On the other hand, it is the best time to sleep (in my opinion). It's a natural physiological instinct (humans aren't supposed to be nocturnal; however we seem to break a lot of natural rules), but it also seems that to sleep while it's night gives me a double blanket to pull over me, to snuggle up in and rest as deep as I can. Thus I spend the most parts fighting a desire to sleep with the desire to traverse all the dimensions of wakefulness. In this sense, I equate wakefulness to space. Space in the sense of unboundedness resulting in part, the freedom to gaze at my belly which gives birth to the hope that I could discover my true heart. And then it springs the desire to gain some kind of clarity at the end of such a journey that only the night can take me on.

Therefore I guess I am not a nocturnal fish enjoying some sort of freeing when swimming out to the moonlight. I imagine that freedom in fish-swimming as it's a far more buoyant movement than the rather weighted, graceless ambulatory mode of humans. Pacing is not as elegant as cutting through water with a flick of a tail.

*Sidenote: One of my partner's bettas was just started on Melafix treatment for his tail rot today. He's a lot calmer now, and not zipping round frantically trying to nip himself from the itch as he was yesterday. Thank God!