The fog rolled in sometime late last night, obscuring my restless dreams and turning the night world into a ghost story. Perhaps fitting, the dark spirits trying one last time for a pall (should darkness govern in a thing so small); this is the final day, the long-awaited conclusion to months of practical purgatory. The crack is starting to show, and as Leonard Cohen says, that is how the light gets in. A long winter’s night, except that it was winter and spring too, and April is the cruellest month, and are you done with references yet? April was difficult, true, but May was worse; mostly because the closer you get to the end, the more the prospect of time is an irritation, an insect-like aggravation that pesters and misquitos your concentration. It peppers your conversations with vampiric needles. It clouds your eyes like a fly swarm.

I wonder, as Iryna sits next to me on the ride home from the airport, if we will feel the shedding, or hear the crystalline sound of the ice-sheets falling and shattering, or feel the thaw of spring and glow of summer all in one evening. Probably not; these things have a way of persisting, leaving ghost overlays, holding on for their wraith-like life. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the purpose of ritual, of ceremony and celebration; yes, to mark the passage of life’s great events, but to give power to the transition, to give it a threshold, and to give you demonstration of its passing. In short, an exorcism, to dispel the spirits trapped in purgatory, who might decide to cling to you as you move onward.