Jun. 29th, 2010

zanzjan: (zookie)
I just returned from taking the big silly dog for a nice walk in the dark of night. This was precipitated by the passing of gas by my eldest child in my computer room, and immediately led to the idea that some fresh air would be a nice thing. So out we went.

The night is beautiful.

After nearly a week of stifling humidity, the suffocating air wrapping itself around you at every move -- as you sleep, as you eat, as you try and fail to think through the sluggish miasma -- drier, cooler air has moved in. I took my flashlight with me but only turned it on once to alert the sole car traveling my road to our presence. The rest of the walk we had the stars for light, some hidden behind clouds, some blurry in the remains of the dissipating haze, some bright like the sky reaching down and placing a kiss upon your face. Lightning bugs danced out of reach, playing their game of now-you-see-me, now-you-don't, and the sound of the moving air in the trees and the insects in the fierce tangle of forest beside the road kept us company. In winter you can taste the weather on the air, small shifts in patterns like hints written out in shades of coldness, sharpness, and subtlety, but in summer you can taste life, glorious life, all around you, and it is intoxicating.

I thought about plots, and what my bad guy should be getting up to right at this moment in his story, but only a little bit; mostly I tried to soak the night into my skin, take in that magic, that comforting darkness, as if I could somehow store the world itself inside my soul for other moments, an elixir against the stale insides of office buildings, the meaningless jabber in meetings, the pixels on a screen burning themselves into my vision.

The dog peed many places, and was happy.

Most of the time I feel entirely alone in the world. (Okay, I lie: I feel that way all the time. It seems to be part of who I am.) I don't mourn this though I do wonder how it came to be, if other choices, leading elsewhere, would have brought me more love and closeness, and what those same other paths would have cost me of the life I have now. It is a contemplation only, not regret. Oh, I don't mean that there are no people in my life I am close to -- far from it. I have many wonderful friends who are also stars in my sky, who are there for me every time I remember to look up. I have my children, who despite occasionally annoying behaviors (like farting in my office) are each one fantastic, fascinating people, without whom the walk in this world would be a walk without the ever-changing majesty of clouds, without the warmth of the sun or the cooling rain, without the healing shade of the forest. And there are a few people like mosquitoes who trail along in my wake in the dark, nothing more than a faint buzz fading in and out of notice, ghosts of old mistakes and unforgiven hurts, who I have come to recognize and accept as the inevitable other side of the coin of living.

I stood in the middle of the dirt road, my dog at my side, the air on my skin, the sounds of the forest in my ears, and I raised my face to the night sky and marveled as I always do at just how inconceivably many stars there are, how absolutely beautiful being alive is, and it does not matter that I am sometimes too alone in the world, because I am always, always embraced by the universe.

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