Ghosts and Distance

From the small patch of earth, the one with an orange tree, black sage shrubs, the still growing avocado plant that will someday become a tree, the handful of succulents, and the slab of concrete on which he stands, he looks up to the darkened sky with the pin dots of light and time. He looks off past the scattered cloud bodies, reaching out amidst the streaks of light across the aqueous blue, through nebulae and broken bits of satellites and rocket ships still floating in the vacuum, still containing the ghosts of sputnik 1 & 2, the dulled barking of Laika, the small echoes and lost radio transmissions of the Apollo missions, and the soft crunching echo of the first steps on the astronomical body orbiting earth. He gazes out at the streaming light swallowed up, mostly, by the darkness. As the breeze picks up and the leaves on the shrubs and the trees dance in the night, he wonders how many of these little lights remain from the days, when as a child, he would go out into the field with his grandfather, at his ranch somewhere in Baja, and look up at the canopy of light, a scattered field of tiny orbs all glowing and whispering in the night about the possibility of time and space, flickering imperceptibly like the lost transmissions swallowed up in the void of space. He wonders how many of these lights have faded since then. How many have found their way into the canopy, and if any have died and been reborn.
Breathing deeply the scent of fall, that slightly burnt aroma of dust and fallen leaves, he thinks back to how many moments have faded into memory, disintegrated there with only small fragments left so that they’ve become like the strobe effect glimpses that comprise trauma montages in film, where each doesn’t amount to much, and even collectively only point to a fractured story. Too often, looking back, ruminating, in the attempt to retrace, experience seems much like these montages. How many of these patch the way from that brilliant canopy on the ranch, as a child, to this moment, now, he cannot count. You lose track as you move forward. The star light dims and leaves only the ghost impressions of the experience of living. There’s the laughter, its sudden rupturing of all other sounds, in all its different shades and tones. He can smile, often, when he hears it woven into the soft breezes. There are the heavy sighs, and he carries those too, they weigh mostly in the evenings as he turns again and again on the aging mattress with its creaks, as the moonlight manages its way through the slits in the curtains. There are the swallowed breaths, the ones that bulge in his throat when he faces a significant decision, and he imagines so many decisions to be thus, as if any one of them and each of them could alter the course of his experience. All of these float around inside him, like those lost objects in space. All of them unmoored from the experiences which gave them animus.
And he stands there, gazing at the infinite space above, trying to connect the dots, the way illustrations do as they point out Antlia, Corvus, and Crater. There are no straight lines. Not like the ones in the images, not between the glimpses of experience or anywhere else. But there’s a certain satisfaction in standing there, trying to imagine that all these pinpoints of light somehow connect and form something greater than the solitary light each one emits. It’s not unlike the comfort one feels imagining that it’s all more than igneous gas and space dust. That something, some force scattered all of these lights purposefully to light the distance between the darkness and the ghosts of time and space.