Orion diving towards the horizon.
I had staggered out of night shifts and into the greyest of weekends; sputtering out the end of it all in a haze of exhaustion and grief. Overlaying all this was a long silence on how and when I’d be able to go home: a heavy curtain that was lifted with an MIQ voucher released on Monday; and now, a border cracked open. When I was a kid we used to visit my great Aunty, in her late 80s, who lived in an 1800s villa in Helensville. The hallway was wooden with a long carpet runner down the middle, the door at the end had glass inlays and was always shut- we would enter through the back, via a small kitchen painted cream and yellow. The hallway was always dark and lit with what daylight would cast through the door windows. I have no reason to have this image, but I imagine my lovely Aunty bell, opening the front door instead of the back, and light pouring in, and rambunctious kids bounding in through past her, maybe unsettling her steady stance. There’s a joyous danger in the border opening....