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I was born on a night when midnight rose from its dark fire and swallowed up the moon, its lips sliding across the lunar surface as they would the silver curvature of a teaspoon until there was only the crimson shadow of the elder creature's gullet. Standing in shadows glowing black like the undersides of blankets strung over beds and bodies in northern cabins, the plants around me ashen, still, leaves craning skyward in awestruck alarm, the nocturnal sounds of the sprawl were struck dead from the air and I watched the frigid, cosmic feast in absolute silence.
I say born, of course, in the sense of an awakening, a stirring of something deep within me that had yet to be fathomed, that had yet to draw its hands across my heart and mind, to find secret entrances for whose existence I was completely unprepared for, to pull open the gates and loose upon my being a million different shades to which I had been blind. I was in fact born some twenty years before that in a hospital on the shores of a suburb whose name has now ceased to be. This time I did not scream until much later, too absorbed in watching a stranger's glowing face recede from a world smelling of Norway Maple and the damp carpeting of last year's fall. Months and years later I would cry and crumble in fetal devastation, but for now I was a shivering witness, dumb in the mid-ground of a stand of broad-leafed invaders, watching the silver whorl's slow ingestion.
I held my breath and waited for a sound, a quake, a gathering of animals to dash past me in existential panic, the crash of trees and sky and neighbouring highway overpasses collapsing, concrete shrapnel sawing into dark asphalt and left embedded there like shark teeth caught in wounds that would wait to bleed until shone upon by the next day's sun, the chaotic gurgle of a creek reversing itself, flowing upstream towards its source, backing up the aqueducts from which it would emerge to flow across the tollway and drown jackknifed behemoths of petrol and steel. I waited for albatrosses and condors to descend from secret heights and scream a final warning to this landscape. I waited for a crack, a rumble, a hiss or creak or sudden shiver of the air so violent and surprised as to be rendered audible.
There was only the absence of crickets.
There was only the air held jacketed, restrained.
The whole world trapped in one of those moments when she, later, would look at me but could say nothing. A silence of great canyons, of glacial fissures and deepwater trenches, of watching from a distance the gorging of scavengers upon a carcass.
I held my breath until my lungs hung as close to asphyxiation as the rest of the universe, and then I held it a little longer. My vision grew threadbare, my mouth cottoned and spasmed, and then the silence was brushed away by the sound of a thousand pairs of curtains drawn open in unison, unveiling secret windows on quasars and pulsars and alpine meadows strung with fluttering butterflies somewhere out in the depths of pangalactic space. The reedy trees shivered involuntarily and looked about them as if unsure whether our jury had witnessed a real revolution of the cosmos or simply a dream of arbor and starlight. Something small and avian called out from the viscous darkness; it received no reply but the tenor of its own voice must have served as reassurance enough as it made no further sound. I looked up again and in a space of startled time that had seemed no longer than a few seconds the night's great maw had withdrawn and the moon shone again, not so much triumphant as renewed, warmer than it was before, its glow more assured despite the shattered confidence of the glade in which I stood.
I was born and I hardly understood but I sang in communion with trees and streams and small nocturnal animals and waited for purpose, for the big reveal, for this shifting tide to carve a new beach and bring up upon it a thing to fight and strive and grow further for. I stood under power lines and I pressed the boundaries of the declining sprawl lands and I walked into walls and cars and doors I should have kept clear of. And then finally, under another magic sky, this one overlooking a day shattered and bloody, someone took my hand and led me in. |
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