Reflecting

It’s 1:00 AM, and it’s snowing again, so I open up the top half of the kitchen window and rest my chin on the frame, drinking in the cold, stony tasting air.

The sky is close and gray, and the backyards behind our apartment building are lit up like dim daylight. I try to imagine how it’s possible that it can be so bright outside in the middle of the night.

Maybe there’s a feedback loop, between the light of the city reflecting off the clouds, reflecting off the snow, reflecting back up into the sky, like two soft mirrors facing one another, amplifying the ambient light and diffusing it all over everything, as the quiet snow swallows up the dark earth.