Lost on a Moonbeam

A silver slip of a moon is showing from behind the dank dress of darkness. Radiant is the night sky in its very shroud, like the blackest heart of a diamond. The ghosts of trees are uncovered in my intrusive headlights. They appear to be sleepwalking, those trees, with their pale eyelids loosely shut and their hair tangled in the blackness. I see the stretch of the sea rising up before me, and if I could, I would drive full force straight into the waves, headlong into the horizon, and steer myself on a moonbeam to the world on the other side of the moon. There is a garden there, you know, just like Howard Pyle told me about in one of those books, those books a "grown-up" like me shouldn't read - as if fairy tales were only for children. The blinker, steady and impenetrable, guides me to the left, and life winds up along the coast on auto-pilot.

This all-too-tranquil world needs a thunderstorm, I think. One of those rants of heaven when the rain comes in floods, when the lightning strikes the fingertips of the sea, when electricity grows scarce and candlles light up a room revealing its hidden identity - the alternate reality of candlelit darkness. Send me lightning, O heavens! Send me fire...

Picture courtesy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blupper/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Mother's Day

The air - salt, water, heat - rubs up around me in the sticky green nightfall. Nothing but the salt in the air (why can you smell the salt of the sea, but not the salt of the table?) reveals the presence of the sea beyond the road just there, beyond the slow stoplight and the salt-licked condos. It is the kind of evening when we should be treated to ice cream, if we were on vacation. But we're not, and the Starbucks is closed too early, and the man wandering around alone makes me wish I parked closer to the grocery store. I am almost in a dream, asleep as I breathe, inside this cool and ambient atmosphere of the floral section. Yellow roses. Those are my mother's favorites. A bunch of baby's breath to go along. Why must it be called baby's breath? Babies do not breathe the scent of flowers, at least in my limited experience. "Happy Mother's Day," the cashier says half-asleep by rote, and I wonder if I should take offense at this - I am not a mother.

The darkness is like a sleeping dragon oblivious beneath the stars, and the sprinklings of lights between me and my home talk years in  the silence. Driving at night the long sea-winded road makes me beyond awake - like dreaming, like sleeping, with my eyes open.. "... all your actions write the melodies to the songs that we sing..." Anberlin - yes, I am an Anberlin addict - songs drift like the road, like my thoughts. Hello, Past. Hello, Memory. It's been a while, or not so long, since we reminisced on the dark road home.

Happy Mother's Day, to all the mothers out there, especially my own. My mother is the most selfless person I know, and I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for her.