Surface Tension

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. 

The Color of the Fire

Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present, or so they say, though I sometimes wonder. Sometimes I think that all of time must already exist right here, though we might only see glimpses when the conditions are right. Sometimes I think maybe we are all watching from the future, and the past is only filling itself in. We feel it in our bones and then later we say, "I knew it all along." 

There are certain times of the year when I catch sight of shadowy shapes gliding by my windows, but when I look there is nothing, only a crackle of static or humming in the air. Not leaf-light or flitting birds, but something both more and less substantial. I wonder about the source of these apparitions, whether it's the past or the future leaking through. 

I think about what imprint we make on the world around us, the color of the fire that emblazons our presence in this world, or the spark of life that exists outside time. 

There is no way for me to know yet, but for now, I can speculate. 

 

With Wings

Spiraling like ancient knowledge

Everything hangs in a still eternal moment, like a pause between breaths. 

...

It was 6:30 in the evening or thereabouts, on April 22, 2019. I had an idea, took a breath, gathered my courage and set it whirling. It hasn't stopped yet.