Any dew left from the hours of dark will soon turn to steam, rising like a spirit into the sky and disappearing into the dawn-softened air as the sun rises into full flame. The sound of a barking dog down the street steals a young man from sleep. He wakes and for a few groggy moments watches the light fall over his bed in shafts so solid they seem like something he could pluck out of the air.

This morning, a Tuesday in July in the hottest year in recorded history, is much like many others, full of climbing temperature, animal noises, and the fading traces of the daybreak pastels still smudging the edges of the sky. This morning is different too, though, for this is the young man’s final chance to wake and gauge the shine of morning, his final chance to wake at all. These hours of heat are already moving quickly, but he supposes that every end comes too soon.

He crawls across his comforter, sits down at the desk in the corner of this, his childhood bedroom, opens a notebook, in which he has been keeping track of all that has happened in the last month: a ledger of waning hours, these little screams of time in a blur all leading to today. He flips to the beginning of the notebook and starts to read what he wrote just twenty-nine days before, a span which seems both a lifetime and no time from now, a whirling of days like dirty water in a drain, spiraling toward tonight.

Journal - Day 29

I’ve decided to keep notes from today until the end.

I think I want to do this because of a story my mom told most nights

before sleep when I was growing up. I remember the streetlights and the glow from our neighbors’ houses filtering in, casting a soft light, like something gilded, spilling over my childhood bedroom. My sister and I on my twin bed and my mom in the chair at the desk in the corner of the room. Before the story, we were silent, in a half-darkness in which it quickly became hard to tell what was or wasn’t a dream.

After the quiet, my mom would begin to speak. She told us the story of the Tzadikim Nistarim, the righteous ones, a group of thirty-six Jews from each generation tasked with justifying the existence of humanity to God. She’d explain how these people often don’t know they’re chosen and simply try to lead noble, humble lives. She went through her favorite examples of Tzadiks, as righteous ones are often called, throughout history: a story of a man who everybody thought was useless, but who could make it pour rain at his command; a young woman who took to the road wanting to be rid of people and their often evil ways, but who ended up bringing miracles wherever she went; and a grandmother who could make anything grow, even bringing crops back from brown and wilt with the guidance of her small, wrinkled, holy hands.

Each night my mom ended the story saying that we should live our lives like these members of our greater ancestry, as if we were made to be righteous, to be good, to make miracles unknowingly wherever we went, justifying to God above the world below. The last thing she said before she left the room, taking my sister with her and closing the door, was that maybe the goal isn’t actually moving beyond this life or today, but living as a light sunk in the ever-reaching dark.

So here, in these weeks before what’s to come, for the sake of sparking a pinprick of something bright in the deep, I’ll do my best to detail for

almighty eyes, in which I’m not sure I believe, my world and life and family. For what’s the use of writing in times like these—in this end time—what’s the use of writing at all, if not to do just this?