From the Kitchen Window

 It's been hard to communicate lately, so I keep to myself and scrawl things in my little book. 

The Opposite of Presence

It's late mid-winter in northwest Ohio, and the wind is achingly cold. The fields are empty even though they are not empty. The silence is a deafening roar. 

Muddy sun sets in grey sky. Cell towers blink on the horizon. At dusk, the belt of Venus appears in the east, but close, so close that it feels that the edge of the earth is near.

The pain in my bones signals my own existence. 

I step into the field to pose for a picture, but already I am disappearing from the landscape. It doesn't know me and won't miss me. My greatest value now is in being gone.

Inside, invisible to see, I recall that it was only a year ago that I watched the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter from the end of my street. Every night the planets drew closer and closer. It seemed to mean something then, it must have meant something; even if I can't remember the way it felt now. I watched and waited and was happy then, until the planets moved apart, the way they always do.

"I am an other, and I always was."

"There is no inside except as a folding of the outside" said Mark Fisher in The Weird and The Eerie, but recently I've come to wonder if that's entirely true. 

It was a February afternoon, when a bird flitting low across the road in the pale light brought, in a sudden flash of wings, an incursion of silence, as if the world (and my consciousness, too, being part of the world) had stopped for a moment to acknowledge this ordinary, extraordinary happening. 

Since then, I've begun to wonder if it's not so much a folding, but more of an alignment, a reminder in that flash of wings that the inside and the outside were always the same - we just forget to notice sometimes.

Between Aldebaran and Pleiades

Thursday, 7:30 PM. 68 degrees, winds SSE at 9. The sky is clear, and all is quiet except for the windchimes in the trees. I'm standing under the garden archway, which is a little worse for wear after the recent freeze. I have one hand on the fence, balancing. I am keeping watch. For what? Oh, I don't know. Something I can't see yet, for this is always the way. You don't see it until it arrives. 

Through the branches of the juniper tree, I see a bright light in the northern sky. A plane heading south. It's distant yet, and I can hear no sound, only see the light growing larger as it approaches. Soon I can see that even though the sky looks clear, there must be a layer of mist higher up, as the lights from the plane make a halo as it comes. I lean on the fence and watch it flying, and for a moment everything feels so cozy, just the juniper and the plane and me. 

In a few more seconds I can hear the engine's hum, and the plane flies low overhead, cutting a path between Aldebaran and Pleiades. Soon it is out of sight, and now it's just me and the juniper, and the high layer of mist that I know is there but can no longer see. I wait a moment, and then it is time for me to go, too. 

Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. As ever. As always. 

Perception, Not Necessarily Truth

Days spent packing all my worldly goods into a storage space across town, the place seems like a home away from home. The rows of silent, sun-bleached buildings seem to mirror my internal loneliness. Occasionally the wind rattles a lock or a leaf, but otherwise there is nothing.

The sun is so bright it washes out everything. The blue paint is peeling. Little chips of blue flake off onto the concrete. I keep remembering the place as looking a little better than it does. If this is what my loneliness would look like, then it should look a little better. It's loneliness, but it doesn't feel so bad. At least among these silent rows, there is momentary peace.

Silence

It was one of those days...bright, silent, filled with unexpected shadows. There was stillness in the wake of the latest murder. Two men approached me near the edge of a field. I said hello and they let me pass. Today at least, I wasn't worth the trouble.

Downtown, the only sounds were the humming of electrical wires and hinges creaking in the breeze.

The shadow in the bottom photo makes me look like a monster, but this is okay. It's monsters who look like humans that are frightening.