-In the crepuscular moments, when silence stretches into absence, when fatigue and wakefulness wrestle on eyelids, when scant refractions of light unsettle shadows and cause them to shift creating apparitions and illusions of beings that never existed, that is where all the moments of the journey and its detours settle into the same monochrome. This is when the distinction between dreams and the dreamer fade and the evanescent glow of certainty ruptures completely. The pulsing driven by the metaphysical heart stills and scatters like the embers of fire. In the cooling breath of night when synapses lay barren and neurons tremble, the mind relinquishes the labor of threading together the experiences of life, dreams, and imagination which do not quite fit. These are the moments akin to the ancient Hindu concept of Kali, where there is neither good nor evil, and beyond that, neither the sense of cohesion nor a sense of the absurd.
It is here, in the moments broken away from the imagined narrative of life, that he finds himself calmly staring at the stillness of the world, while life has taken its respite. Light spills across rooftops and onto street corners, as if someone forgot to hit the breaker and shut down the stage. The lights above this scene seem like nothing more than a well-constructed backdrop, dozens of little spheres against felt. In this stillness, in this silence, he questions his own reality, considering each memory he’s carved from the process of living, the act of dreaming, and myriad moments of imagined realities. They all seem equally valid or invalid. It is in these moments, when refraction is exhausted, when sound – if there be any-echoes, when the ethereal and the quotidian conflate, that the light sensitivity of pupils fails, and as he stares down at his hands, they seem to lack definition causing him to question whether he is nothing more than consciousness and if so, whose? Funny, he thinks, laughing in that way you do in order to avoid an opposite reaction to some uncomfortable awareness, that the reality which is felt so keenly, so concretely can be nothing more than the pulsating of a synapse. And if it is, then who is telling this story?
He takes the tumbler in his hand. He swirls the spirit inside and watches as it dances between the light that trickles onto it and the darkness around it. With one gulp it vanishes. It lights its flame through his larynx and down the tracheal passage way. He almost coughs at the burn, but he holds it in. His thoughts drift, as they return, over the uncertainty of their construction. He wonders, as he refills the tumbler, if any of the pieces could ever fit, if he could ever find enough that did to reconstruct the path that led him to this moment, or the moment before it, if he is in fact removed from the narrative in which he embodies the role of the protagonist. An antihero? He attempts to gather the pieces. He begins with the tumbler, closes his eyes tightly, allowing the spirit to light its flame and the heat to descend into his core. Like a candle, it lights his darkness, it illuminates the floating images which swirl about him, a translucent collage of moments, steps, decisions and indecisions. He reaches out and grabs at them, the way you grab at pillows and hold them close when you’ve woken just before dawn. These, however, resist. They resist his grasping, they resist his hold, and they slip away floating further from where he first reached out to them.
He watches the way that the displacement of one disrupts the others, and before the image settles it is off again and so are all the others. A swirling mass waving against the burning ember of the spirit. As they begin to settle, he reaches out slowly, reaching for the torn corner of a different image, which he gently pulls toward him and sets down on the chair next to him. He is tempted to open his eyes to see what it has become, but the ember flickers. Its warning. He tightens his eyes and reaches for the nearest image, again, gently bringing it towards him and setting it down at the opposite end of the table. As he does so, darkness settles. He hears the sound of shoes skipping about, feels the air displaced by movement around the table, and he hears the soft voice of a young girl singing “Strawberry shortcake…” He feels the weight of his eyelids and swollen fatigue, and he is unsure of whether he has found himself between dreams in that dark moment when the subconscious and consciousness, both, having lost their personal tallies of the ticking seconds of life, struggle to affirm their hold over the reigns of perception. He holds the darkness and in it, he hears a quiet whimper which sends a shudder through him, much like those which are the reason he seldom reflects on the oldest of his memories.
He decides, for what it’s worth, he will open his eyes and face some version of truth, even as the air continues to be unsettled, the tapping of girl’s shoes skips around the room, and the girl sings “…blueberry pie..” The weight of his eyelids forces him to struggle with this decision. But he persists. The light, though scarce, invades the surface of his corneas, assaulting the pupils and forcing them to scatter. He shrinks at the sight of the girl in her white dress still skipping about him, the empty translucent film bouncing about between shadow and light. That empty shudder crawls down his vertebrae, he averts his eyes and finds a small boy sitting, whimpering, on the chair to his side. The translucent film from which he came, still resting on his hands, the fingers intertwined, resembling the position one places them in when praying. The boy’s eyes, downcast at his hands. The skipping, the white dress, the shifting of air, the song, “Who’s gonna be…” The man recovers from the hollow reverberation crawling through him and reaches out to remove the film. As he does, it disintegrates. The boy whispers, “Is this what it’ll be like?” His eyes rise to meet the man’s. “Is this what it was like?” he continues.
The man, his eyes wide open, feels his shoulders defeated by a shivering, and with them everything fades. He is left alone. The same scant light interweaving itself between shadows as it fights against the darkness in its attempt to keep itself from being subjugated. The skipping of shoes echoes, only in his mind. The chairs sit empty. He looks down at the tumbler. They are gone, whatever they were, but he feels the rushing of fragments, dreams, and long lost moments rushing, like blood to the ventricles of the heart, to the stage in his mind. But everything has faded, the images he thought he captured, the remnants of conversations which left imprints scattered, the memories of emotions which added to the weight of his heart, the dreams which left him breathless, as well as the ones which woke him in the mute darkness of night, the great scenes from movies which gave so much breath to the vicarious experience that it became confused for one of his own, along with the lyrics from songs which reached so deep into his soul they left him feeling he had lived another life, and the distinction between these, what was real and what was dreamt, what belonged to another life and what belonged to this one, faded also. In that chair, in the near absence of all luminescence, in the loneliness that follows after the departure of company – wanted or not, he shivers with the wide range of emotion, experience, and the dreamed up other lives which the childhood imagination accustoms one to. There in that chair, he is consumed with the sorrow of forgiving, gasps between tears, rages in anger, and hollers with laughter. He is every memory, dream, song, sorrow, triumph, joy, and tear he has ever felt resonate within him.
When he is done and sits again in that moment, reminiscent of Kali, he pours himself another tumbler full of the single malt spirit and imbibes it in a single gulp. As it travels down the cleared out cavity of his body, it burns away the tiny bits of ghosts left after their obsequies. He shivers and is ready to sleep and ready for the new day.