Roofline

Some nights
I want to live on the roof

Not visit it
Not escape to it briefly

Live there

Make a small religion
out of shingles and weather

Drag blankets across the incline
let the night air raise goosebumps along my arms
learn the language of wind
instead of human disappointment

Because roofs understand things
houses do not

A house remembers too much

The rooms hold emotional fingerprints
The walls repeat old conversations quietly at night
Even silence feels furnished

But a roof
a roof faces the sky directly

It knows rain intimately
Knows the ache of August heat
Knows hail
lightning
the slow ruin of seasons
and still remains open to the atmosphere

I think I belong
to that kind of existence now

Open-air
Half-feral
Emotionally exposed to weather

I imagine myself there at midnight
flat on my back
watching clouds drag themselves
across the moon
like exhausted thoughts refusing sleep

The cold fronts arriving first as whispers
The smell of rain climbing upward from the earth
Tree branches below me
thrashing softly in the dark
like grief trying to become visible

And for once
nothing asking anything of me

No performance
No explanations
No pretending the body
is not carrying entire oceans of feeling
through ordinary life

Just me
and the terrible beautiful atmosphere
of being alive

Maybe spring would soften me there

Maybe summer storms
would teach me how to come apart correctly

Maybe winter
with its clean unbearable cold
would finally quiet
the constant machinery of longing
inside my chest

And maybe that is why
I ache for height

because sadness feels different
closer to the sky

Less like drowning
More like weather

Passing through
Electric
Uncontrollable
Briefly luminous

Some nights
I swear I could sleep there forever
letting moonlight collect along my skin
letting rain baptize every memory out of me
until I became less woman
and more horizon

something no longer trapped inside walls
but stretched endlessly open
beneath the enormous dark mercy
of night