Blue Redux/Chapter 24

Tuesday, the 27th of June. Again, the brightness of the sky draws me outside. The heat this time is stunning.

It's a little more than a month since the day of the blue paint and crescent moon, though the sense of layered time remains. Even if the air feels on fire, the sunlit grass and the shadows are the same. 

Out front though, the yard is empty. Around back, everything is still. In this space is absence, as solid as the heat. There is no longer any sign of laughter or murmured conversation. Cicada drone is the only sound. 

I sit down on the same rock as I'd done before, feeling as curiously old/young as I had in May. The emptiness of the place runs though me now, draining into the hollow ground. It's that sensation you get when the party is over, the guests have left, the visitors have had to go. I know this absence is the price I pay for moving on. My mother has said she never wants to see me again, and the current me, the chronological one, is resigned to this, knowing there was nothing else to be expected, though I worry a bit about child me, who was always so desperate to please. Child me is surprisingly stoic, however. It turns out, like the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon, she already knew the score. 

The sun is searing, blisteringly hot. It's the hottest June on record, they say. I get up, seek some cover among the trees. I pluck flowers from the whitebrush and desert willow to save, because they don't have them where I'm going. I occurs to me that I am trying to fold Texas away, put it in a box like a keepsake, knowing that in a years' time it might mean something more to me, but it just as likely won't mean a thing. 

Over top the clothesline again I see the daylight moon. It has grown from the thin crescent of 25th May, dwindled and grown again into a fat waxing gibbous. In recent days the boys have been increasingly restless, the grown-up ones wanting to get on with the rest of their lives, the younger one impatient to be somewhere else. After years of stasis, things had suddenly begun to move. Action brings good fortune, so the I Ching and Pink Floyd say, and perhaps this is true; in fact, I'd say it almost certainly is, as inaction has done us the exact opposite. But for every action taken there is a world left behind, and this, I think, is what I am looking at now. 

Absence of presence as presentiment. The empty space where we used to be.

It's a melancholy feeling, to be sure. 

䷗

But let us allow hexagram 24 to have its say. It is advantageous to have a direction to go. 

Dog Star

Walking widdershins through the side yard to the back, drought-colored grass burning under my feet. The grass is scattered with leaves the same color. Everything has turned brittle in the heat. 

I pass my husband who is sorting through boxes on the porch. We say nothing, but I can feel his preoccupied silence. I wonder if he notices my receding figure as I walk away. In my mind's eye we are like planets, moving through conjunctions, oppositions, trines.

On the other side of the fence, even as I stop to consider it, the woman who lives next door is dying. I push back against this stark knowledge and find myself remembering the lighted doorbell of her house, how it always flickered faintly, like a pulse. 

The dry grass stabs at me, rustles in the dusty breeze. 

I think, to live is to pass from one space to another. I think, I would make an inventory of my pockets, if I had any. 

Far away in the blue distance, Sirius stirs and yawns, awaiting its heliacal rise. 

Image source: Canis Major

The Opposite of Absence

It's high summer and the landscape is breathless. Even the cicadas have gone silent. We move in slow motion if we move at all; I feel like a photograph that's been captured mid-step.

The hallway light flickers, the dishwasher churns, a patch of sun creeps across the face of the kitchen clock. The kids tell me about the hum of the powerlines on the corner, but I find that I'm too old hear it now. 

In the bath, a stray yellow leaf clings to a hand towel on the rack, its parched edges furled like wings. There's a vibration in the air that feels like waiting. It's nebulous but heavy, the opposite of absence. 

In The Weird and The Eerie, Mark Fisher asked "who or what is the entity who has woven fate?" 

I listen to the soundless space where the hum used to be. I get the feeling I might know the answer. 

Dustlight

It was the dead end of summer, the dry heat so dense you could lean on it, almost. It had been that way for a while; dust rising on Union street in the glaring sun.

I was more than a little wilted by 3 PM when I started up the front steps. If not exactly dizzy, at least a little out of sorts. Perhaps it's no surprise that between the second and third step, I felt time fold over on itself.

There I was as a child, walking up the steps to the hobby store on the self-same street, and the steps of the church hall, and the door of the Hermann Son's lodge for dance class, and swinging around the railings at the old convent with Karen, and playing hopscotch downtown as if these memories lived in a place made of summer heat and I had just wandered in.

I thought "the heat is a doorway" and though it only lasted a moment, I realized it was true.

Adventures In Orange

Gonzales, Texas, on a Tuesday afternoon. Wandering the quiet sun-bleached town. Remembering. Nothing special happened, no epiphany, just the slightest breath of the past, a faint scent to remind me of what it was like to look forward to something.

I snapped this in the mirrored window of a locksmith's shop ("space for rent", the sign said) because of the novelty of blending in with the color scheme.  It almost never happens, you know. I somehow usually manage to clash.

Sun In Splendor

A day so hot, the air moves in slow motion. Heat shimmer rises into the sky. There's nothing to do but seek the water as the sun blazes its way toward the ends of the earth.

It's the burning edge of summer, and the morning chill of May is just a memory, unbelievable, ridiculous even, to think I could have ever felt so cold.

The Waiting Landscape

There is something eerie about an empty field in the noonday sun. As if it's waiting for something to appear out of the heat shimmer and cicada hum.

Drifting

Steam rising from a hot street after a rain, or restless souls drifting in silence?

There are certain days when one might be convinced it's both.