Sometimes it feels like something is about to happen, but nothing happens. I wonder if I missed it, made the wrong move at the wrong time. Perhaps something did happen, but it's too subtle to register in my dim understanding. Maybe I stepped across the line into another dimension, which is so like the previous one it's impossible to tell. Maybe I'm like the foolish protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, who comes to believe that the extraordinary thing that was going to happen to him would be that nothing happens to him (spoiler alert - he was wrong).
On nights like these, I go outside and look at the sky, hoping for insight to descend. It is out there, waiting, but I can't reach it - there is something in the way.
Sometimes, twilight clouds hang heavy over the house. The cat hides under my bed at the sound of thunder. Sometimes, the wind from the lake batters my west window like a ghost demanding entrance. Erie/eerie.
One night in the dead of winter, my housemate and I were lying on my bedroom floor, drawing. Far above in the icy sky, we heard the sound of a plane. "I'd hate to be up there on a night like this" he said, and for a moment our imaginations drifted along with the pilot, mapping the edge of the atmosphere.
Last Thursday I went to a lecture at the planetarium. I felt dizzy as the projected sky spun around and around. The astronomer pointed out what the astrologers call fixed stars. I remembered watching the sky night after night from my altar rock, and later, when the world was very different, standing by the gate and gazing between Aldebaran and Pleiades.
My own past words come back to me, here in her future. "The word on the astral is things will never be the same. You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed."
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