Congruent Daylight

When I was in elementary school, I remember learning about congruent objects in the enrichment classes I attended, and how if you folded them in half, one side would match the other side exactly.  The teacher passed out sheets of paper filled with squares and circles and hexagons and pentagons and funny-shaped polygons that still, if you folded them along the dotted line, would match up side to side, and we spent a whole period folding pieces of paper to determine if they were congruent or not.

After we learned about congruent objects, I became obsessed with them.  I stared at every object I saw, whether it was the kitchen table, an armchair, the television, or our cat, drawing a dotted line straight through the center of whatever the object was and mentally folding it in half.  If folding it in half in one direction didn’t work (I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, draw a line across my cat’s back and fold it in half from head to tail and call that congruent), I would try folding it in the other direction, rotating the object in my mind.  I wanted everything to be congruent, to match up nicely and neatly.

I’m sitting here at 9:30 a.m. this morning staring out the window at the bright morning light.  I woke up at 8, a couple of hours earlier than I ordinarily wake up, but I start a new job on Monday that’s going to be Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 5, so I figured I’d start transitioning to that schedule this weekend so it won’t feel so shocking Monday morning.  I like it, I think.  The morning light seems to spark creativity.  But yet, there’s something about it that’s not so different from the evening light.  The street in front of my apartment is still covered with shadows that will shrink with the tick of the clock and then reappear again this evening, although in the opposite direction.  If I could twist the day just a little at the center of it, spin its rubberiness around with a flick of my finger, fold it over and paste it on itself, it too would be almost congruent. 

Lately I feel like even my weeks are congruent, with Saturday not looking so very different from Sunday, except that it brackets a different end of the week.  Maybe even life is congruent, building to a peak in the center where you could slide your fingernail across and make a crease, except that at one end you’re heading out of the shadows and at the other, you’re heading into them.