It becomes haunting, chilling, when the sun appears for only willful spurts like the rest of the toothpaste in a near empty tube, somewhere between 2-4pm, and you’re swallowed by night again. Why go outside?

Your thoughts turn serious without you realizing it, but you consider that the sun would evaporate the ugly thoughts quickly, dry them out like raisins and you’d move on to something more vibrant.

This dusk-reality was sinking into my organs  yesterday (Friday) as we got home from the store and it was nightfall (at 5pm) and all I wanted was nutella and crackers. I’ve been trying for the last three days not to eat only nutella, milka and ritter sport chocolates. My diet has been the opening credits of the original Willy Wonka movie. You might not have even thought about chocolate for days but then you start that movie and it’s all you can do not to eat a bulk-bag of chocolate-covered raisinettes. Once you’ve seen rows upon rows of chocolate in those credits CHOCOLATE IS THE ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION, every child’s cry. every SAT answer and every response to the orca whales’ cries in captivity. It’s all the answers and you have to have it.

The seminal reason I want chocolate is because it is the color of the sky. I look outside and it is the color of hazelnut dark chocolate- what is a woman to do? The sky I see between the hours of 4pm to 9am is wall to wall chocolate. But when the walls of saccharine stucco temporarily retreat, a preview of Florida is flashed on the canvas outside for a matter of minutes and I’m amazed at the two universes tugging me between light and dark. I’m stuck in the second day of Genesis and God can’t make up his mind. They don’t both exist at once, and the second that the light disappears I forgot it was ever there. There are a few minutes between 4:15 and 4:37pm when light and dark coexist and it feels like a horrible doom setting in, like all the bad guys are about to win.

And yesterday my soul was sopping with irritation. I wasn’t mad, I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t even irritated. The word was rotten. I just felt deeply unhappy as if my soul was starting to mold and I was deeply furious. Nobie convinced me to come to the Hamburger Dom with Manuel and her friend. I walked the 25 minutes to the Dom, listening to tunes on my iPod, to be eventually accosted by all the bright carnival lights. I had arrived to the Hamburg DOM. I realized as I mosied into this colossal affair of light, color and repetitive sound that this was the last place on earth I needed to be. I was furiously unhappy for no reason, not the kind of fury that makes you snap at someone but the kind that makes your soul boil deep down so low that you can’t say a word of negativity because it will only be mist compared to the boiling rage that you feel in the mantel of your being. I walked towards where my group was supposed to be and simply observed the variety of brightly lit booths, rides and restaurants. Is this what Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin had in mind? This is where light and electricity would go to have their final hoorah before being banned from planet earth forever or going off to war. Maybe because the sun was gone for what felt like hours before I even got there, this all felt like a big hoax, a neon riot against darkness. Dylan Thomas would be so proud?

You see It turns out that there is no substitute for a blue sky and actual sun light. For someone with a soul that was welded out of anvil material, one might imagine that I would thrive in the dark, that it would a natural habitat or incubator for all the lugubrious and ultra-poetic thoughts that toss through my mind like blinking bumper cars (which I passed twice at the DOM), but I have learned twice over and even more that a part of me slumbers and overeats every January because I don’t know what to do with myself without natural light.

I don’t want to go outside when the sun is out, I am just happy to know that it is there. Aren’t you glad to know that there is a functional lightbulb in your attic even though you have no intention of going up? The sun is like this for me. I love a rainstorm just as much as the next introvert, but I grew up in Florida where the sky is all about two minute afternoon tantrums before it goes back to its sunny postcard-ready backdrop. In fact, it might be sunny while its storming, that’s how much Florida can’t get enough of that UV-Ray-machine.

Humph. So I went to that crazy light up display and afterwards we walked to a nearby bar that was hipster-infested but manageably so. We chatted for a bit and around 12:30am I walked home alone. It was an 18 minute walk, I love lone walks at night in Europe because I don’t ever fear for my life. In the States, an evening leisurely stroll for a lone lady in the city is positively out of the question. But here it’s expected, normal and unobstructed. Though a homeless man did yell at me so I mistakenly looked over to see him exposed and peeing in my direction, but that’s what I get for walking near the infamous Reeperbahn (red light district) at 2 in the afternoon.

As I walked through the crowd of over-neoned people who were either enjoying it because they were on drugs or have happy souls, I felt so disconnected from the world that I felt like hardened cement. Usually I am so conscientious about meeting new people and covering up my Debbie Downer like a prominent chin zit but I had no desire to even try last night.

When I returned from my 18 minute walk, scaled the 5 floors to our door, removed my shoes upon entering, shed the layers of jacket and got comfortable, I saw on the computer that France had a terrible thing happen, a jihadist attack that reverberates our fear of terrorism and shakes us all at our core: fear, mortality, hate.

I didn’t have any feelings after I thought about what it would have been like to be in that spot in Paris that was attacked.

I don’t think these things were ever in the plan: light-up theme parks in winter or jihadist attacks. Please don’t think I would ever compare the two, but my point is they are both so unnatural that I can’t understand them. But they continue to happen and they will continue to happen. I suppose my best option is to operate with more grace and hope that I’m never attacked senselessly.

About the victims, there is nothing I can do. I am sorry that we live in a world where real feelings get twisted into unreal horrors like that.