The first time I ever saw one was back in 2020 before the virus had gotten very bad. I mean, of course back then, everyone thought it was bad. It was a Pandemic. We’d even thought we’d gotten used to it. We hadn’t, of course. People still thought they were going back to school, thought of telecommuting as an anomaly, you know. I hated to say it back then, and I still have to be careful now, but for a while, I was relieved in all sorts of ways. Of course I didn’t tell anyone, no. There was no room for that. People were dying. There was death and fear everywhere. I was worried for the world. It was sick, in a more obvious way than normal, and I wanted it, of course, to get better. But…the way time changed. The way the mad rush had finally stopped. That…that I liked. I’d been waiting for that for a long time. I think that’s what adulthood is, maybe – the moment you start waiting for things to quiet down. No. That must be something else.
When I got out of a car and the radio shut off and the car door stopped dinging and it was suddenly replaced with the quiet roar of the wind in the woods, a certain part of me registered that reality had resumed. You know that feeling? When you spent all day running around, talking to people, being assaulted by sounds and thoughts and tasks all around and it’s pleasant, that feeling of being busy. Occupied. Useful.
But then; the clicks of the keys counterclockwise in the ignition, that moment of beeping before you close the door, the rustle of fabric and the jingle of keys---
THUNK.
The car door swings shut, and with it, all of the commotion.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the automobile is the gateway back into nature, back to the quiet world, when it’s responsible for ushering in so much of the much of the cacophonous 21st century. No I won’t get started on a “back in my day”. I’m twenty six, thank you very much. Replacing that cacophony of the asphalt world of computers and phones is the gentle rustle of a million leaves on branches swaying to their own slow, alien dance, reaching up to the sky in their botanical yoga, always reaching just to reach. Sometimes I think that we’ve already landed on an alien planet, it’s just that we forgot.
No idea what I’m talking about? No problem. Maybe it’s just not your language. Maybe you would say “Yeah I love trail running.” Or you’d say, “yeah it feels good to get some fresh air.” That’s okay. We’re saying the same thing, or at least trying to, reaching towards each other with words that don’t quite manage to reach the essence of the thing. We settle for our labels. This is all well and good, until you mistake it for the real thing. Pluto’s cave and all that.
The shadows in the parking lot cast by the giant oaks glistened long and golden. My dad’s silver camry was just one of two vehicles in the parking lot. I looked around because I didn’t want to bring my keys with me. Not seeing anyone, I rest them on the back left tire. I try the water fountain but it’s still not working. No, no that’s not it; it’s been shut down. Public safety. This park is officially closed, I suppose, but you can’t really close the ‘woods’.
A couple girls in warm clothing appeared at the top of the hill in the direction of the main park entrance. I made a show of looking wistfully off into the tall pillars of the forest. I don’t know why. Probably because the girls are my age. A bit of a charade considering I don’t talk to strangers much anymore. Used to all the time. Strike up conversations like my dad still does, at anything at all. Liked the rush of it, not knowing how it’ll go. Like looking at a mirror that could reflect anything, anybody. Or maybe for the hope that I might look past the mirror for once, look into someone else’s eyes like “and who are you?”
But it was dark. I saw a single furtive glance one of them sent me. No way to know what was contained in that glance. It seemed likely it was something like, “this crazy white dude, running when the sun’s almost down.” Maybe she thought I’d sprain my ankle. The world could be scary, sure, but I remember it seemed silly to me then to not think of the woods as safe.
Of course, this was before the stories.
I took that as my queue to sprint down the hill, into the eight o’ clock shadows as their car started it’s engine in the dimming parking lot behind me. There was light to see the roots. Light to look down and see my feet moving.
I focused on a place inside my chest, waiting for the fire to burn. I still wasn’t enough of an endurance athlete to know if I really loved the fire. Sure, sometimes the fire felt like a friend. Like a steam engine burning energy right through you, filling you with the joy of the raw momentum of it. Biking has a continuity to it, a flow, sure. I loved to bike.
But running? Running has something else. It has that bam, that impact. An explosive rush with every combustion of my aorta as my feet slam into the ground like pistons. Yes I’ve known people who run like bikers, flowing along barely making a sound. Sure, maybe it’s different for them. And hey, I’m not stomping, okay? But there is a certain joy to the impact of it. The feeling when the ball of your foot finds a nice firm piece of earth held in place by an exposed root – perhaps it’s about certainty. To know how it will feel when your foot hits the ground before the fact, like a good steady bassline.
Because that impact is where the rhythm comes from. It sidles up to you and it carries you away, up the hills and back down the gullies. Your body jostling back and forth but the whole time the rhythm of your heart and your footfalls strumming away at a level of muscle memory obliterated eventually into an abstraction that allows your mind to wander. Your mind and your body, two separate machines churning along with each tumultuous second. Scratch that – three separate machines; there are your senses, too, equally independent..
A white flower with six petals. The distressed honk of a goose separated from its v. Then soaring overhead; already its call is quieter, lower pitched from the Doppler effect. A splatter of cool mud on your calf, but you won’t notice ‘til later. A small bluish light to my left, shifting behind the leaves of the saplings towards the creek. The honk of a car, somewhere in the muffled distance. The smell –
Wait. A light? Near the creek, yeah – a light.
A light. That shouldn’t be there.
The echo of a dog barking rings through the woods. Perhaps it would be threatening if I wasn’t so used to these woods saturated with friendly canines during the day, prancing about, sniffing each other’s butts.
The harsh echoes through the small valley returns my mind to its place five and a half feet above the cold earth and I remember to hear my own breathing again. It’s heavier than I thought. A light? A small sort of glow of light shifting underneath the leaves, I swear. A porch light? But it had been moving down the hill. And I don’t see it now.
I’ve already been running for almost ten minutes. Can that be right? Felt like shorter than that but. Yep, here’s the bend in the creek, where a smaller brook meets the stream at its elbow. The surface is black but the water laughs reassuringly, meandering towards the Potomac down below.
If someone could, god forbid, get rid of all the trees in the park somehow, it would probably look like one of those paintings of the mountains by Georgia O’Keefe. Folds in the earth created by veins of water.
These macro wrinkles in the earth are undeveloped. The outer suburbs of the cities are built on their brink, but even then their foundation includes stilts and concrete pillars to steel them against the incline. This is the edge of where people can make their homes. As I near the creek, racing down the hill, I can see the golden shower of their backdoor-lights glowing in between the branches at the top of the hill, overlooking the water. Not cheap properties. I’m looking up at the lights on their porch and yeah, those porch lights are nowhere near where I saw that bluish light, shifting underneath the leaves, glowing through them, yes it was glowing through them I can tell that much even though I saw it for a fraction of about a half second.
I’ve reached the creek. The water is low. Sometimes it babbles and laughs like water sometimes does but as I said the water is low and it is silent but for the ripples that striate the edges of its reflective surface, where it touches the stones. Right, I know ripples aren’t a noise, but sometimes certain types of movement, they are something like noise. The blinking of a light, the shaking of a leaf in the breeze. These things don’t always make noise, but it’s so clear what noise they would make that I can sometimes almost hear them. A ripple wouldn’t sound unlike a leaf shaking in the wind, I think.
Sploosh.
That was a real noise, echoing off the sides of the creek bed in the way the water has. A rock hitting the surface, maybe someone knocked it in as they crossed the creek? This path criss-crosses over it several times, and stones don’t always stay in place. Of course, it must have just been someone using their phone light. It was getting somewhat dark by now after all. I was slowing down my pace, worried about the roots. Now I stopped completely. At first I don’t see anybody. But behind a the exposed roots of a tree on the river bank, I can see the suggestion of the small form of a child. There is another noise, this time rock on rock. There are more sounds of movement, the clicking of rubber against river stone.
“Jeremy!”
This name is called from the very top of the hill, out of sight behind the dancing trees, where the woods meets the neighborhoods. The moving form before me stops, intent.
“Jeremy come back to the house! It’s getting too dark.”
There is a pause, and then “Okay!” this Jeremy fellow yells back. He sounds about eight years old. I’m still curious about the light. Kids are getting phones younger and younger these days, who knows. He runs up the path, wearing sandals and shorts and I think no, probably no phone. He returns to his home, one of the buildings with their shower of golden porch light at the top of the hill. Once he is gone, I skip across the rocks like stones do on water when you flick them off your wrist and I break back into a run once I reach the other bank. Yep, it was over here that I saw it, that light. Nothing. Looking around I slow to a stop and listen.
There’s that sound again; the leaves whispering their hushed song, the trees swaying to their slow rhythm. Weird. No light.
And no sun. It’s getting too late, so I hurry back into a hurry up the banks of the creek to finish the loop.
As I fly by the bench at the intersection of two paths, I hear the unmistakable wild tones of teenagers. My feet are quiet on the packed dirt but theirs are trudging through leaves and breaking twigs, alcohol amplifying the sound of their voices, predicting the presence of music. I speed up to avoid a confrontation as I am liable to do during or outside of running these days. Their walking stops and with a stupid internal smirk I know they heard me. I imaging what it must have sounded like, those racing steps approaching and then gone again, just as fast, and what they thought they heard. Probably just a runner. But they’ll never know.
As I reach the tough part, the hill back to the parking lot, I frown. Maybe it’s at myself for taking pleasure in intimidating some harmless kids going to get high in the woods like I used to do in high school. Maybe I frown because of way the exertion of the uphill incline is hitting me in the chest. A little bit of the frown is realizing that one of them had their flashlight out, and it had been white, streaking, and very local. The image of that bluish glow in my mind earlier, it didn’t resembling it at all. The glow had been oddly steady, unbothered. Not something held. Uncontained.
I arrive back at the parking lot, dazed from the hill. Maybe one day I’ll be able to crest it without being winded. For now, it’s an accomplishment that I can do it without losing my pace. Not even two weeks ago I walked up it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Do you know what the key to being a good runner is? I’m no pro athlete, but I’ve been running for six years, and I’ve come to some conclusions. I think that the key to being a good runner is a balance between two things: persistence, and taking care of yourself. Treat yourself like your own child that you want to see grow. “Just a little farther. I know you’re tired, but you’re doing great”. It’s hard. Difficulty changes only as fast as your body gets stronger. But positivity, self-love? Gather all that up. Anger, even hate, those burn fast. They can get a good run started. But that self love, that positive energy, that stuff burns slowly for a long time, longer than a single run. You can stockpile and use it again for your next one. And there’s this: the number of days you run is always more important than how far you run. Running every day is how you increase your mileage limit. Running until you drop is how you ruin a beautiful sport for yourself. Unless you’re being chased. Then you can go as fast as you’d like my friend.
It’s there. Rather dim, actually. Barely yellow, almost white. It was just a pinprick, but it was directly across the parking lot, hanging about ten feet in the air. It could have been a streetlight, but there were no streetlights. This park closed at dark, and it was dark all right. The woods were one big shadow, besides the glowing light in between the trunks.
I fumbled for my keys, barely glancing down on them, not wanting to take my eyes away from this light in the woods. I glance down for a moment, to put the key in the lock of the door. When I looked back, there were a hundred of them. A few hundred lights, hanging in the air with haloes around them. A few more blinked into existence the longer I looked, sort of like stars.
I had seen videos of aerial drone displays, and it was a little like that. I thought it could be that. My grip loosened on the key to step towards them but it was as if they got the idea first. The lights began to move towards me. And they echoed. There was a sound, but it was almost as if, like a dream in that
I didn’t even hear it until I remembered it later. Something took over in my and I opened the door and I drove out of that parking lot. I sat in my car for a moment in front of my parent’s house and I remembered that noise, not unlike rocks echoing off of sides of the creek.
Later on, I eventually thought of something my friend Elliot told me. At the time, I’d been pretty sure he was just fucking with me. Even now it’s more than a distinct possibility.
Our families used to rent this house out in West Virginia. My mom found it in the classified section of the newspaper, $150 a month, and she went right over to our neighbor Sue Grace. Sue is Elliot’s mom, and my mom asked Sue if she was doing anything that Saturday. They drove a couple miles west to a valley in the mountains that used to be an apple orchard and they split our first month of rent. I have a younger brother and Elliot has a younger sister. We kept going back for sixteen years, and another family got in on it to. It became something we had in common, a sort of small country that we only we knew.
We had a lot of games to play out there. Not boardgames. More like, hide and seek, and card games. When it got dark, we played something called the mug game. The mug game was simple. It consisted of simply taking a mug and walking with it as far into the darkness as we could and you’d put the mug down however far you made it. The next person would try to make it just as far and pick the mug up and take it a little farther. As nine-to-twelve olds, well, it was definitely skewed in favor of the older kids, but even then nobody made it more than a hundred feet or so. Once we were older, the game became boring and unplayable. But back then, it was a riot.
And of course, when playing games in the dark, there’s always this side plot of trying to freak each other out. Popping out from behind trees, or the more subtle telling of ghost stories, that sort of thing. And of course back then lying was on the table. You could make up whatever if you thought it would be scarier when passed as a truth.
Once when we played the mug game, Elliot was gone a long time. By the time he came back, we were pissed.
“What took so long?” Jesse asked.
“I saw something.”
“Sure,” I said. All credit due, Elliot was actually pretty theatrical, and I was entirely ready for him to pull something. What got me was this; he saw in my face by the light of the flashlight that I already held the smirk of someone who wasn’t going to let their leg get pulled, and it illicit a very specific response.
What you have to understand about Elliot is that he is not someone who wears his emotions on his sleeve. He’s in a psychiatry program right now, and I’d say he has something nearing full control over what emotions he shares with others. If it’s beneficial, he’ll share a little of what he feels, maybe. But for the most part, he tends to communicate logic and facts and keep his feelings to himself.
But in the light of the flashlight, I saw hesitation, and maybe even a little hurt. These weren’t things I was used to seeing. And yet it still occurred to me he was winding up to mess with us.
But he just said, “We can get the mug tomorrow. I went pretty far and I’m tired. I’m going back to the house.”
That sort of killed the mood. Many years later I brought it up. Or well he did, actually, but I prodded a just a little, having been given the opportunity.
“Remember the mug game?” He asked, a little pride evident in his voice, as the mug game was actually his creation. Or maybe he brought it to us from somewhere else. In any case, it was his game.
“Yeah,” I laughed. “It was hard! I really had to work up to getting all the way to the woods,” I said, laughing at the recollection. We started at the cattle-guard and how to go a thousand feet or so to make it to the woods. Once we could all do it we quickly stopped playing the game.
“What’s the mug game?” Elliot’s girlfriend Alyssa had asked. We were recounting stories of our friendship from back in the day. I was meeting her for the first time, a few years ago, before the virus was a thing.
As I explained it to her as I just did to you now, I remembered that moment in the glow of the flashlight, when I’d seen Elliot’s face that one time. I swear it’s not a figure of speech when I say that, upon remembering it, it was more vivid than the first time I’d seen it. It was as if, as a young child, I hadn’t really known what I had seen. But now that I was older, when I looked back on that expression I was sure it was genuine. And I was also sure that I didn’t know what that meant.
“Hmm. And it was fun?” Alyssa asked.
“Well, yeah. We spooked ourselves out. Like remember that one time?” I said, getting into it before I could even help myself. Transitioning, as if naturally, to a question that I suddenly felt was very important to ask. “When you came back and you said you saw something?”
The twinkle in Elliot’s eyes was approaching quantifiable. He tilted his head, as if thinking, and then said, “Which night was that?”
“Well we’d…our parents had gotten kind of drunk actually, at least the men,” I said, laughing a little as the night came back to me, “And all of a sudden they had this idea that they wanted to go back up to the ridge to see the stars. They were yelling and trying to direct each other which cars to use while also fathering up sleeping bags, and blankets in their arms,” I said.
Alyssa laughed. “What? Wow I can’t imagine my parents doing that at all.”
“Oh believe me, it was new for us to. We were half amused, and maybe a little bit worried. They weren’t wasted, but they just had this urgency that was, well. It was unexpected. A little childlike.”
Elliot smiled, “Yes! I remember that Kerry turned to us conspiratorially and said, Well, I guess we’re the parents now.”
“Wait Kerry was there?”
“Yeah remember? That was the same weekend that we played Mafia, up on the hill during the day, and Ruby made daisychains.”
“Oh yeah, yeah! Wow that was a great day. And yes…I think we all kidded ourselves into some level of supervision over our parents that night,” he said.
“Well I mean, it was sort of warranted. That’s the only time I’ve seen both of our dad’s drunk together and between the two of them, they were a mess.”
I smiled at the thought. “Yeah that sound like a shitshow.”
“It was. It was fun though. Fun feeling like we were in charge. I think that’s why I went so far that night.”
“You’re talking about the mug game?” I asked.
“And this is after,” Alyssa said, clarifying.
“Yes, that would be after,” I said to Alyssa.
“Yeah, the mug game.”
“Right, you did go pretty far. That makes sense, you were fueled by that sort of, I dunno, the relativity of adultness. Seeing our parents act so silly, maybe that made the dark seem more manageable in a way.”
“Yeah, exactly. Or I was just pumped up from all the excitement.”
“Right. But I didn’t even think about all that. I thought, I dunno, something happened out there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, you said you saw something.”
“Hmm,” Elliot said, looking off again like he had before. I have to say, it looked more like he was thinking of what to say than that he was searching his memory. “Yeah, yeah I did.”
Alyssa looked at him expectedly.
“Well? What did you see?”
“Well,” Elliot said, looking off into the hills out in the darkness beyond the campfire we were seated at. “So you know that ridge over there?” He asked Alyssa.
We played a lot of sardines. Sardines is like e hide and seek, but in reverse. If your it, you go and hide and everyone goes to look for you. Then, if you find the hider, you silently crouch next to them or climb up or do whatever you have to do to quietly hide with them. Eventually, there’s just one person left, wandering alone, calling out “hello? Guys? I can’t find you?” and, as you are crammed together like, alas, sardines, you try your best to stifle your laughter but it often gives you away in the end.
There were two kinds of sardines games; outside, and inside. And the most important thing was to get everyone to play, even the parents, because then that meant the stakes were pretty high; if you were the last one left, you were truly alone.
You could say it began in the 1920’s. Prohibition. That first little taste of the government telling it’s people no. Not a novel thing at all, doesn’t even qualify as tyranny. Something more like a regulatory experiment, admittedly fanned by religious piety. But it started then. The speakeasy’s they were called. Where you went to be free, essentially. That’s what it came down to. And so unlike other criminal places, the speakeasies had a special scent of liberty to them, a sort of purity you wouldn’t expect in these basements and backrooms.
That’s when the seed was planted. In people’s hearts. So 40 years later, when Nixon resigned, there were those who were ready. Who said “nope.” And that’s when this other America was born. Somewhere along the great migration of blacks going north and whites going south, that’s when it happened. A handful of secret societies. We aren’t talking your Yale frats. And we aren’t talking hillbilly militias, although these societies weren’t without their hillbillies.
These societies formed allies. Industrial Tycoons, a few well-placed politicians. There creed was one of solidarity. They called themselves,
The Gardeners.
John Muir was a Gardener, but he had more hope for the rest of the world. He wanted to share what they had. He wanted to share what they’d be given, which was against the rules. His intentions were good, and he was careful. He didn’t make mistakes. So he was never punished.
Steve Irwin. Irwin was punished. Amelia Aerhardt. Jimmy Hendrix.
A different writing I found of the Elliot story I found in my Journal
So a little background, one Saturday morning when Elliot and I were in fifth grade or something, both of our Moms drove a couple hours to West Virginia to investigate a house that is, apparently, for rent in a valley somewhere on a former apple Orchard. My Mom is a researcher. She reads the news, the listservs, the emails, the back covers of books, cereal boxes, the labels of clothing, the license plates of cars, etc.
“You should apply to this contest at the library,” she says, “there’s a new Mediterranean restaurant opening on George Mason!” she says, “There’s a new farmers market downtown,” etc. And you just stop wondering how she knows these things because, as I said, she reads. But as commonplace as it seems now, I gotta hand it to her at the pure agency of reading about a little house for rent in an idyllic valley in West Virginia. Sure, it’s no Colorado but for $120 it’s a steal if we share it between to families. It can be our little getaway! And shit, we keep going to the place for the next twenty years until eventually the owner decides the 3000 acres aren’t worth the upkeep costs. But is was good while it lasted.
Elliot was, is, a good friend of mine regardless of this situation but that was one thing we had in common. The farm. We’d always go up to the farm. We’d spent weekends there, the two of our families, and even though our parents were only half friends in a way I’ll never quite understand, we had some good times up there, the eight of us. My brother, Elliot’s sister, our parents, and then a third family of friends who rented another house and had a daughter named Jesse. The three of our families became a sort of axis. Each of our families had friends we invited out to the farm in a somewhat routine manner until it was a group of about six families that were acquainted with the place. Hell, if you’d gone a little more often it might as well have been a commune. We were still pretty young when we first set foot on that mountain land and we quickly took it upon ourselves to explore every inch of it. Okay, that’s a lie. We didn’t really know what to do with it for about a year and instead played pinball on my dad’s laptop. But when that got old, we explored everywhere. I mean, there was nothing else to do.
What we did is we would pick a direction each day and we’d spend the whole day going as far as we could. Three thousand acres of wooded mountainside turns out to be enough for a pack of elementary-to-middle school aged children to do this for quite some time. Once we had done the cardinal directions, we did their subdivisions, and so on. We made maps, and we named things. There was Misty Mountain (Elliot was Tolkien fan. It wasn’t really much of a mountain, more like a very large hillside) and Apple Mountain. There was the Bird Woods and the Broad Field and Moslandia and Truck Meadows and Shadow Valley and The Butt Tree and so on. And none of that is too important except for perhaps to demonstrate the extent of our exploration and to set the scene. Once Elliot and I were looking towards freshman year of highschool we had a lot of ten mile trips; five miles out, five back.
There was one trip that really stood out above the rest. It was with Elliot and a few of our mutual friends Elliot and Carlos and Bruno as well as my brother Noah and his friends Wally and Alex. We packed sandwiches and everything and set of for a real trip.
We went up to Apple point and followed the gnarled old apple trees, the ones that handn’t been cut down anyways, into that gate that marked the beginning of the northwesterly woods. We crested the wooded peak of Woodsman’s point and then made our way down into the ravine. We eventuall made our way into a small valley we hadn’t known about, which had a chicken farm. Bruno and I kind of wanted to go investigate, but there were private property signs and the other boys convinced me not to. We made our way up the nest mountain, skirting more private property, on the outskirts of a strip of George Washington National Park. It’s perimeter is lined with small farms and houses. We found a creek bed and a little ways in, we found a dead cow writhing in maggots. I remember that it smelled bad enough to make you want to retch, but the most delicate blue butterflies were perched on the carcass. There must have been a couple hundred of them.
What are the lights? They are beings of energy, constellations of points of tiny reflective matter that store coordinates in time and space. Their presence here is simultaneously playful and pointed. They want to reduce human activity, to preserve the forests, trees which are their friends.
Introduction to Chapter 2 (Unfinished)
Ever discover a task you’ve pushed to the back of your mind only to realize that the reason it hasn’t been done is simply because you have never chosen “now” as the time to do it? You’ve been waiting for the right time to do it, and yet it’s never come. Because that time is the present. And so you basically have two choices – forget it again, knowing this is, in a way, your last chance, or engage in it.
You must know the sweet relief of choosing the second one. That juicy nowness. The ability to push everything else away and make this one task the most important thing.
And yet, I choose the first choice, time and time again. It’s like I’m addicted to it. Procrastination. Putting things off. There are some things…there are some things I just can’t bring myself to do.
The wind was whispering again. Everywhere. It was less comforting now, like a conversation I that was going on whenever I turned my back. The telephone lines swung slightly in the wind, bathed in soft pools of golden light. Occasionally I would hear one buzz as I ran by. It was a Monday night, and it was just very still. I guess I hadn’t gone running on any Monday nights since the virus really began. Here I was, on the fourth or fifth neighborhood block in my run, and I still hadn’t seen a single person, or even any cars. I could hear some of them up on the busy road. Without realizing it, I turned that way on the next block. The gusts of wind would intensify in bursts, the trees singing their soft sibilant chorus.
When I was younger, I used to have a lot of night terrors. A lot of kids have them. My parents always told me that I tended to have them when I stayed up too late, or sometimes when I had too much candy. This makes a kind of sense to me. From this information, my hypothesis would be that the brain is vulnerable to in incorrect mode of unconsciousness when it is imbalanced. Perhaps exhaustion has depleted certain neurotransmitters or impeded the functions needed –
Jesus, there it is again, the fucking wind. I shivered, and my feet suddenly naked felt naked as the gust of wind swept right through the thing material they were made of. In order to get tot Wilson, the road that marked the end of my neighborhood on the northern side, I had to pass through one of the dark roads. It had been in the paper. Problems with the power grid. People getting checks from the power companies to move into hotels for the time being.
There were no pools of golden light here, and I could barely see the outline of the leaves thrashing against the subtle greyish air. The leaves weren’t so loud, but there were just so many. It was somehow deafening in a way that didn’t have to do with volume.
Which brings me back to my dream. Dreams, plural, actually. Like some sort of organically produced, night-time horror series. That’s the thing about these dreams – and really, I’m not playing them up, I’m just using this as an opportunity to delineate two concepts – these dreams were horrifying. They were not; spooky, scary, disturbing, ominous, or skin-tingling. They were horrifying, and they were terrifying. I don’t know the exact properties these words possess that qualify them to describe my dreams during this time, but those other words simply don’t apply. And I think you probably know what I’m saying. There’s a sort of quality of emotion produced when despair becomes so deep and urgent it becomes painful and the pain intensifies and with it, the hope that it will subside on it’s own goes away. And that hope, that hope was part of you. When that hope is replaced with something new, a desperation, a part of you goes with it, as if someone has stolen the peripherals of your eyeballs and you have permanent blinders on, sentenced to look frantically around.