Soviet-Era Hours

The brawling sea, ill-light and an inability to remember the colour of the sky. No sun. No depth. Nothing. The sky is a void of no-colour. No temperature either. Not warm and not cold. A lukewarm, lukecold unpleasantness. A sickness of the air. Like breathing after a night of chain smoking.
February is a country where the industrial revolution never stopped, never progressed. Late Victorian factories producing nothing but the thick miasma of these days. An industry of epidemics, like rumours of Polio, passed through thick and slow moving waters.
The skeletons of octopi, washed up on broken shores. An impossible driftwood.
I lay on my sofa this afternoon and watched it get dark. Drifting in and out of sleep. Out of the bedsit window, I could see the top floors of the houses across the street. On the roof, a cluster of chimneys growing darker, till finally they black shapes against the fading skies. I watched the lights of rooms be turned on. It reminded me of December, those long slow days leading up to Christmas, that bleak ritual of lit light bulbs in the barely-afternoon.
The man in the bedsit next door is playing music. A bass rumble that accompanies his opening and closing of cupboard doors and draws. Cutlery rattle, a dinnertime song.
February is best when night falls, because we can forget the hollow white light of its days, its hours that feel like a lifetime sentence of having to work in some mythical hellhole factory in some  brutal and forgotten Soviet era country, beset by blackouts and superstition and rumours, only, of revolution.