power

we had two power outages yesterday. one around 4 for a few minutes, then another around 5:30pm until about 8pm. the neighbours gathered outside their darkened homes collectively scratching their heads and wondering. we went for tapas in kensington and then came home, lit candles and waited the darkness out. it's funny we kept calling home to see if the answering machine would pick up, a sign the power was back on. kind of like, hello darkness? are you still there? there is something sort of fort-like about these emergency measures, like a secret space in time. i kept a mini flashlight beside the bed just in case. we laughed when the power came back on, the beep of the fire detector, the answering machine...all waking up from their slumber.