Near Dunedin, New Zealand, circa 2005.
I open the door. Cold slaps my cheek and pockets my breath.
I open the door. Cold slaps my cheek and pockets my breath.
The sun is gone. I step into the darkness.
Something is moving; something speaks. I cannot hear but rather feel the words in my flesh, the trembling excitement. It’s the feeling when you wake up and remember it’s your birthday. When you sit up in bed to peek out the window and realize the world is covered in snow.
“It’s time,” the words say.
I shiver in the parking lot. Watch the wind pass through the streetlights.
“You’ve found it. The world.”
I close my eyes and feel a great leap.
“This is all that exists.”
Thumping hard, my poor heart and I. We are weak in the face of the truth.
“What will you do?”
I look up, alone with the moon and a couple of lampposts.
Then a remember the house in New Zealand, a place where I thought I could live like a writer. Forever alone, not lonely exactly, just deep in the world with my thoughts. The house stood in the middle of nowhere, a single room on a broad field flanked by mountains and a low, cresting sea. Silence for miles, just the chop of flat waves and swimming sea-beasts. Wandering clouds, close enough to touch, drifted through arcs of ethereal rainbows.
I imagine spring breaking across that field, then slipping to summer and summer to fall. The color of the grass would be all that changes, the grass and the shape of the stones on the beach. I close my eyes and imagine my heart beating steady, steadier than the roar of the tide.
I remember now. I remember what I must do. I’ll uncover these places; I’ll lay them bare. I will open windows and look across highways to see fields of common experience, moments of certainty, places that let us live as we ought to.
Inspiration feels like a first kiss, like reading my favorite childhood story and sensing the world catch on fire around me. It’s a better life than the one I imagined.
Tonight I stand in a dark parking lot, alone with the moon and a couple of lampposts. Tonight is the world, and I have found it, at once and suddenly everywhere.
No comments yet.