Nights That Don't End

In Iceland in winter the night begins around three in the afternoon and doesn't properly end until eleven the next morning. I say properly because there's a version of daylight in January that isn't really daylight — a grey thinning of the dark for a few hours that your body interprets as light out of habit rather than evidence. You learn not to trust your eyes about time.

I did thirty-five years of night shifts in this darkness. Not every night — there were summers, there were bright months. But in my memory the career is winter, the corridors always lit by the same fluorescent light that exists outside time, and the darkness beyond the hospital windows is total. You develop a relationship with it. Not comfort exactly. Familiarity. The dark has a texture in Iceland that it doesn't have everywhere. Dense and full, like something that has been there a very long time.

I retired in March. The first winter afterwards I stayed up all night twice, just to be in it. Not for any reason. Just to remember.

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