Been seven days since I’ve seen the darkness.

Which sounds like a line from a Christian rock song. Or maybe, an anti-depressant ad.

But seriously.

I’ve endured endless daylight for a week now and discovered that seagulls in these parts never go to sleep at this time of year. It’s possible, I guess, that they take shifts, sleeping. But I can say that there are at least a couple awake and squawking, making their monkey and squealing baby noises 24-7. These seagulls, I also note in the almost-dusk sometime around 3 a.m., are bigger than the ones at home. Like, chicken size if not exactly chicken shape.

Would I prefer to be here instead when the sun goes completely AWOL? Nighttime comes and overstays its welcome for months on end. Hard to know for sure until you experience it but let me just say that, hypothetically speaking at least, you can light up the dark far easier than you can tamp out the light. Blackout curtains? Not as I have lived it so far. There are always cracks, somewhere, micro tears in the material. Some light always gets in. Somehow. And that’s all it takes. The slightest shaft. Even at the far end of the room, on the opposite wall from the bed, the merest slit, a photon or a wave-size stream of light. All the way over there. That’s all it takes.

What time is it? you wonder.

You’re always wondering.

What time is it?

It feels late. Early? It feels earlier than it should be but later than it actually is.

Is that state of mind even possible?

Light is both a photon and a wave. Time is both earlier and later than you think.

Discombobulation.

We know about this.

Insomnia, Stellan Skarsgård, 1997. Insomnia, Al Pacino, 2002.

The light, the perpetual light can get to you, get under your skin and into your psyche. It fucks with your biorhythms, your circadian rhythms. It makes you wonder how people wound up here, way up here, back in the day. From equatorial Africa, more or less, perfect for comparison’s sake, pretty much equal hours day and night throughout the year, give or take a few minutes on either side. Still, we headed north. North, north. Some continuing on their way to settle in the land of the midnight sun. Why? What time of year did they arrive? When it was totally dark or totally light? Maybe it was one of the equinoxes and they thought, This isn’t too bad. Almost a perfect balance, actually. Not too perpetually dark. Not too perpetually light. Here we shall plant our flag!

The realization that this was not the case, that they had landed, in fact, in a land of extremes, was probably the reason they took to the high seas. In search of some modicum of moderation. (Or quite possibly just for the fish.) The need for a little bit of darkness every day of the year. Just long enough for even the shortest of catnaps. Twenty minutes, my grandma used to say. A quick twenty-minute nap and I’m right as rain, she said. Just a little shut eye.

How long was I asleep? you wonder when you wake up with a start. Twenty minutes? Ten hours? Who knows! And where is that light coming from?! Why won’t that fucking seagull shut up!?

It’s not a vacation so much as it is a psychological misadventure. How do these people do it every day of the year? To the untrained eye, they seem well-adjusted, content if not happy. Although, there is that freaky murder mystery genre they do excel at. But in those quality of life indices, Scandinavian countries are always placing near the top. Fare alright with the Gini Coefficiencies. Near the top of the world geographically **and** socio-politically.

What’s their secret?

In a harsh and unrelenting environment, it’s all for one and one for all. You leave no one behind for the trolls that seem to fill the Nordic imagination. Never feed the trolls. Bask in the sunshine when it comes. Hunker down and accept the night as the world turns. For up here, even the darkness has its special lights. The light too possesses its own darkness.

Or so I’m told.

I’ve yet to find it.

But I have only been here for a week.

Seven days since I’ve seen any sign of darkness.