High summer. The neighbor kids' bubbles sail past my door. July in the Midwest. Surface tension between the real and unreal.
There's a running joke that this place is a glitch in the matrix, which is not so much funny as true. It doesn't trouble me; I always did love the Twilight Zone. Sometimes when I go walking, I feel like I'm passing in and out of a half-remembered dream, or at least it seems like a dream, though sometimes it feels like some other life.
Almost anyone would tell you this town is nowhere and nothing ever happens, even though it's clearly somewhere, and something is always happening. People live, they work and study and thrive and struggle, find health and happiness and heartbreak and decline, like any other place on earth, and yet there is the strangest sense among the general population that it doesn't really count, doesn't amount to much, real life happens somewhere else. It's all swallowed up somehow, by the gravity of this place.
Yet the life force inhabits everything here, the radio gods are on point, mystery rolls over the landscape like bright clouds above the cornfields.
I keep my eyes on the sky, map out my routes, try not to sink into the soft ground. I remind myself that I still count - we all count - even if I feel unreal. That the light inside of me is the same as the light outside of me, as it is for you, too, and we are all, at our center, as luminous as a soap bubble on a breezy summer day.
