Stardate: 5.27.09

The ride up from King George (Where my parents live) felt surreal. I spoke aloud to myself as I drove in an effort to pinch myself. The wind rushing in through the windows kept an erratic pattern as it combed my hair from side to side. There were moments when I wasn't sure if I was awake. Moments that still don't make sense. A feeling that I am trying to chase around this page with a pen, waiting for that one moment when sounds make words and I can string them together coherently. Until that moment I'll set aside reason and bring into focus the blurred pictures my senses captured. 

I sped up to pass the trucks beside me, they had been battering the side of my car with their weight for some time. Downshifted into Fourth I felt the engine push me past their abuse, it's groan playing over the sounds that emanated from the speakers behind me. I cut across the empty lanes and made my way over to the exit ramp, slowly pushing down the clutch and letting centripetal force pull me into the long turn. The music faded out to sing a new tune and there was a stillness as I came round the bend. The open windows sucked in the smell of honeysuckle from the forrest beside me and the sun had just fallen behind the row of ramps that ran across the horizon. Not one person on the road but me as the wheel righted itself and the tires hugged the pavement below. A flicker scattered across the road in a slow and steadying pulse from the street lamps above. I looked up to see every lamp above the road for miles blinking and sparking on and off like accidental Christmas lights in May. Sound began to swell from behind my head, honey dripped from the window, sunlight flared to a dull orange and December shone through the scatted lights as they made their way down toward me. Singing out like sparklers in slow motion, realizing they had come two months early. I wanted it to stay just like this. But it was only a moment, until the elements remembered what it was they were doing and got back to being practical. 

I have never seen anything like that before. My mind started to think about what had gone wrong with the power for all the lights to act like that until I realized that I didn't really care why it had happened. I was just glad that it did. 

A feeling of depression set in once everything had gone back to normal. I had felt something during that moment that in I hadn't experienced in a long time. I felt calm and undetermined, content, like the space between the lines. I felt safe in unsafe times. And now the presence was gone, it was like an injection of serotonin straight to the vein, the come down was the absence, it was the understanding that there was no one there to share it with. 

Some time ago a team of scientists were conducting an experiment with electrons. They found that if they shot electrons out of an electron gun through two slits that the electrons would split around the obstacle and come back together again to make one precise whole in the backboard. The finding alone was interesting enough but what happened next stumped them profoundly. They found that when they placed a camera in the area to capture this activity the electrons stopped performing. Take the camera away and they separated, content with being back together. Try to observe and the conclusion was not the same. They called this the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The theory being that these seemingly mindless electrons had some kind of will of their own. That they wished not to be seen performing. 

I felt, on that road alone at the verge of nightfall, that nature had slipped up. That I had gone unnoticed for even the briefest of moments. That I had stumbled into the way that things truly were. I thought about how many time I see even the simplest of events and think nothing of it. I thought of all the sights that were shown only to me. And the complex series of happenings that it took strung together for them to be a reality. That I was only person that would ever see that exact moment again. I thought about memory and how it was a fading portrait of an instance I could never go back to, like a Polaroid developing backwards. I thought about my vision of the future and how many times it had changed. And I wished that I could see it happen again. That I could creep up undetected and look into the mechanisms and clockwork having nature be none the wiser. But it was only something to me, it was only a moment and its clarity will fall apart each day until its a ghost wandering somewhere in the back of my mind. Content to brush up against my dreams and leave me in the morning with nothing but a slight taste on my tongue. 

These are the things of breathless. When the only sounds I hear are wind rushing, white noise from patient speakers and the slow pound of my heart inside my chest. These are the things my mind captures when I'm alone, which is why I seek it so often, but what good is alone if there is no one after. I have only this space and God to confide in. Pages hold only words and He speaks like a whisper, a sound intangible, a sound like one unobserved. I am thankful to be alive, to be perplexed, to be shown such nuance, such quite wonder. I am thankful for it all.