Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

by Ashley Winstead

But joys are few and far between in this life, so I can hardly bring myself to feel guilty.

In a million years, I never would’ve guessed that the first time I’d fall in love, it would be with the earth itself.

Sometimes a person was your home, the love you learned to grow for yourself, stored in another’s body. Sometimes they were the way your body first learned what it wanted. Sometimes they were an awakening.

Laws, religion, civil society—they were just veneers, constructions put in place by the powerful to tame us animals, impose control. Over so many years we’d forgotten, treating the constructions like they were part of nature. But nature doesn’t know good or evil. All nature knows is survival. How terrifying and freeing that right and wrong aren’t laws in stone but navigational instincts, like the kind of instinct a swallow feels for its place in a murmuration, like what guides geese north on a dark and starless night.