northern lights

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A meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

You have a hundred thousand paper thoughts that hover like it’s easy to be weightless. They are deep purple and a blue that doesn’t actually exist and there’s faded veins of gold, cutting through the whole tilted picture like some fragile attempt at a promise.

It’s beautiful and endless and silent and you could siphon it into a bottle and leave it on a stranger’s doorstep. They’d trip over in the morning, and what came out of that broken bottle would fix the whole traitorous world.

You congratulate your mind for putting on a valiant show and pull the heavy curtains closed over the last of the northern lights.

Because the world doesn’t need to be touched tonight. Maybe it just needs sleepy kids to get some rest so they can make it through tomorrow’s chemistry test without falling asleep on the keyboard, and that isn’t even close to enough. But purple and blue mixed together make a translucent darkness that you could swim through forever.

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