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#4 the white sea
Oct. 16th, 2023 06:41 pmOur cold months take up about half of the year, about the end of October to roughly mid-April. During any given time we usually know what side of it we fall upon, although there can always be unseasonably nice days in the middle of the winter, and then we might need a jacket every now and again on a night in July. Every place has people who swear that the weather in their home is always more extreme and unpredictable than anywhere else, and there's a lot of them here, but it isn't too bad. Our own lives are rarely threatened, and for that I'm ultimately grateful. In Missouri we never have to deal with earthquakes or hurricanes, no forest fires, not like in other parts of the world. It's just the occasional tornado and bad storm, hail and frozen rain, and really cold and really hot temperatures. And when we don't want to deal with it anymore, we usually just go back inside. But it's always been interesting to me the way the seasons can conjure these quite different environments while still having the same setting. You can walk on the frozen lake that you were able to swim in six months before. The tallgrass prairie is absolutely bursting with life, and then take the same field that in July was filled with a myriad of grasses taller than a full grown man, bugs, and other animals animals, passes into a frozen and barren lump of lifeless clay by January.
In this part of the country there usually isn't very much snow but the air from the Arctic is relatively unchecked through the plains and dumps down upon us during the coldest part of the year. About two years ago, due to a mix of an unfortunate set of circumstances and a mix of my sometimes unhinged yet dogged determination, I found myself walking several miles back to my house when it was minus-ten degrees, with a wind chill reading of far worse. It was early morning on the kind of day where everyone collectively decided they were better off sleeping in late. Everywhere was a kingdom of ice. There was a hush that blanketed everywhere, covered everything, only the sound of my own footsteps grinding into layers of hardening frost and snow. Trying to walk as fast as I could so I could keep generating heat, the cold was relentless through my two layers of socks and waterproof winter boots, and a strange sleepiness would at times set in. It was strange; almost a siren's call to give up walking and have a rest. Thankfully, I still had the will to ignore the weariness and discomfort, and just force my brain to wander further than the aches then presently ravaging my corporeal form. After seemingly a small eternity and even with sunglasses on the glare from an outdoor canvas of overwhelming white made it nearly impossible to see once finally inside my apartment. In a mirror, the frost had settled on my eyelashes, the steam of soaked coats and hats, my eyebrows the silver of many tiny icicles forming from each individual hair.
I avoid taking a risk using my own car when the roads aren't great, and will take the city bus instead, and even to work, if it's necessary. The battery in my electric car doesn't do well in those extremes which is stressful enough; also over time I've become wary of the abilities of the other drivers around me during bad road conditions. I have no trouble steering into the skid on a patch of ice, but am I sure all the people around me can do the same? I've never been in a bad accident in the winter to where my paranoia could be perhaps deserved, but there's been some close calls over the years. I know enough where I don't want to be in a situation where I wasn't quite that lucky, and if avoiding that fate requires a certain amount of walking, so be it. The bus is free, plus it's warm and normally comfortable enough. On miserable days like those, one is just about the only passenger on the bus at all, where they're unbothered to just put in earbuds, stare out the window, and relax. It is a luxury, to not worry for awhile.
This was during the same winter, during another day, I was again on foot and en route to the bus stop. I had a very late-starting shift in an office on the other side of town, and even though I was walking in the middle of the afternoon and probably the warmest part of the day, the temperature was still only barely above zero. Not far from home, I came upon two little boys, quite young, on the side of the road. They were both crying.
And with children we'll often assume naturally that kids are just playing. But there's a difference here: less maudlin and more raw anxiety, and the hint of pain in their voices to where you realize, soon enough, that this could actually be a bad situation. And that you have to do something. I don't think that makes me a good person. Both the boys were dressed appropriately enough for the weather, minus gloves. On second glance, one boy appears a year or two older than the other. Their coats and hats looked secondhand, but capable. The smaller of the two is the loudest, it's almost a tantrum, directed at nothing or no one in particular. You never hear much about the rage of a wronged child, but it's there. I'm just maybe not a hopelessly bad person. Just like almost everyone else.
After approaching them and talking mostly to the slightly older boy, between the sobs, I put together what happened. They don't actually live around here, but use an address of someone they know who does live here in order to have the children go to school in this school district. In the morning they get dropped off to wait for the school bus, in the afternoon they leave school and the bus deposits them both back at the same stop, and normally their mother will be there to pick them up and go home, wherever that is. Except this day, their mother apparently didn't learn that the school was only open a half day, due to the weather. They were dropped off immediately after lunch. My brother doesn't much English, the bigger of the two says. Neither of them have phones. If what they said was accurate, they had been standing here on the side of the road for already about three hours, waiting for their mother. A kindergartener, a second grader. So many cars had driven past them.
It was such a relief to hear that the older child knew their mother's telephone number. I take my phone out of my coat pocket and call it immediately. After the generic voicemail prompt, I leave a detailed message and who I was, why I was calling, what apparently happened, and that I was going to take the children back to my apartment for whenever she can come get them. I said my address, my name, and left my phone number twice in the message. For the children's part, they agreed without any hesitation. I'm certain under any other circumstances, they wouldn't have come along with a complete stranger, but without saying as much to me it was obvious they understood the inherent danger they were in. The smallest one is crying that he can't walk. My blood flash freezes, I steady myself. Very seriously I ask him if he can feel his fingers and his toes and his cries start forming a word: yeah. I pick him up and carry him the couple hundred yards and up the flight of stairs going back to my place. I tell them my name and they give theirs, but they don't speak English very well and for the most part, it's hard to understand them. I decided that I was going to just call them both "buddy". It crosses my mind that even though doing this is realistically my only option, I'm rolling the dice on several things that could go wrong, that could end up happening to me just from giving a shit, like this. People can be opportunists, you know. People can be all kinds of things. Even if I got in some sort of trouble, I reckoned darkly, at least in my heart I'm aware that I really am doing the right thing.
I also call the North Kansas City police department. The first time I've ever called them specifically, but I felt like they needed to know what the heck was going on within their borders that day and if what I was doing was actually some kind of crime, we might as well just go ahead and get the whole matter over with. An older sounding woman answers the phone, who makes it clear not soon after the beginning after the phone call that she just answers the phone over there and is most definitely not an actual police officer. I explain the situation and she's like, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to leave them outside either. She asks for names of the children, of the mother, but I confess that I really can't tell what their names are. She asks why and I say that they're not great with English, I've asked names but I don't understand them, and that I think they might be Somali, if I had to guess. There's this pause and this oh, and it's the kind of oh reserved by certain white people having certain white people conversations that signals her understanding. I feel stupid about that, and vaguely guilty, but the way more important thing is that these kids are safe now, and warm, and drinking microwave hot cocoa with little marshmallows in it and are browsing Disney Plus. I tell them that they can take off their coats now, but they don't. They could still be feeling very cold. "Keep trying to get a hold of the mom," the woman says, "and if you don't hear anything by the end of the night, call back and we'll get Clay County down here."
Also I call my job to let them know that I probably won't be coming in today. Honesty isn't always the best policy, but I decide fuck it I'll just tell them the truth anyway. It was a brief conversation. They like me, but not very much. "Don't worry about it," they say, "and to be honest this sounds a lot like something that you would do anyway."
Sometimes I wonder where the actual truth is, when it comes to things. Maybe other people really don't see the point in rescuing children freezing in the cold, and they think that I'm somehow a strange person for doing it. Countless others already drove by these children in the freezing cold, all afternoon. I don't know. Or it could be that when other people hear about someone like me doing a thing on the surface so righteous that they feel insecure and uncertain about whether or not they would have what it took to rise to the occasion, themselves. Maybe the truth's someplace in the middle. I can't think about it. What does it matter, in the end.
Hours pass by. The boys don't talk much. I end up making everyone dinner, which is just chicken nuggets and cornbread with butter and honey. Ketchup instead of barbecue sauce. I wasn't prepared for this. Still they eat their food, and so quickly. The older one asks for seconds, and it's fine because I've made plenty, not really knowing on what side of the hunger spectrum either one of them ended up being on. I look at my phone on the other side of the sectional while they watch cartoons, occasionally asking them if I can get them anything at all; the answer is always no. Settling on some light reading on Reddit, I feel anxious. They still have their coats on and never asked to use my bathroom. Excusing myself away from them I try their mother again, telling her voicemail the same information, this time warning her about Clay County. I try to be as composed as I can in the message, but my anxiety grows. An uncomfortable possibility comes to mind: maybe this happened on purpose. Does this happen? Because if I received a random message like this one about my child, it wouldn't matter if I lost my job or not, I would jump in my car as I'm calling that person back, and break every traffic law on the way to get back to them as soon as I could. So where is she?
I think about my own daughter, at home warm and safe with her mother and her jerk boyfriend in another neighborhood, the last I knew. Even though she's a little older now than these kids, it's easy to insert a younger version of her in this very same situation. Picturing her waiting in the freezing cold with no one around makes my stomach lurch, and makes me ache that much worse for the two confused and scared boys in my living room. I always thought that as a parent, to some extent, you become a casual warden for all children. There is a lot of room for interpretation there, of course, and some parents seem to think differently about it than others, but I think at least we develop a certain empathy where we become more aware of the next generation, making sure they don't get hurt. It's reading a terrible news story about the unthinkable, then wondering "what if that was my child", then feeling an inch or two worse. Maybe it's an evolutionary thing, an innate parental drive that ensures your own young stay out of dangerous situations.
Later on, the youngest one is half-asleep on the coach with me, finally resting a bit. His face shows a child somewhat finally at peace, as I'm wondering what the lady at the police station meant specifically during our conversation when she said "by the end of the night". Then there's a very loud knock.
Suddenly put on notice, but assured that this was the mother - or someone - here to pick up these children, I get up. The boys quickly look at each other. I go to the front door and open it.
I don't look in the peephole beforehand.
There is a man, one in a very normal sense. Shorter than me and thin, but well put together. He looks related to the boys that are on the couch, but older. Has seen more, you can tell. His eyes are different than mine, of course human, but unrelated to me. I open the door and I look at him for a second and get ready to say hello.
"I...," he then says, as I have the door halfway open, and then snaps into action and, very aggressively, he forces his way into my home. The act is raw and physical but it is not meant as anything personal towards me. But that is not him paying me a kindness. In the scheme of things, I am nothing to him. I'm just in his way. It hurts, but not too bad. The picture that I framed that Ellie had drawn for me was knocked off the wall, the glass of the frame disjointed from its plastic enclosure. I'll have to get a new one. The cold from outside hitches a ride with him into my apartment, wafting around him. He walks into my living room, and both the boys are already getting up. The man says something in a snappy, authoritative tone in another language. The boys pick up the pace even more. Very clearly, they already know they need to abide by him, he's probably their father but I'll never know, and by the time I've gathered my wits to respond to what's happening in any meaningful way, they are all gone.
The television is still playing an episode of Doc McStuffins. The lights overhead shine over everything. It suddenly feels obscene. Their dinner plates still on the coffee table, half-drank glasses of juice and empty mugs of cocoa residue. It's snowing again outside, yet again.
As I said, there is a warm part of the year, and then a cold one.
I'll wake up hours before I'm supposed to. It happens a lot, far too often. Everything is always so quiet: sometimes in the distance there is an emergency siren or a large truck off in the distance but the rest of the time, just the resonance of my thoughts, mixed in with the leftovers of scattered dreams. The muffled void of the early hours in the city is a certain spell cast by the thousands of people around me, sleeping in every direction. At first I'll try to address any sort of biological need that might have forced me to wake in the first place and go back to sleep in a natural way, but that rarely works. It's all too still. There's always something to think about when these events give me an empty canvas, to worry about, or look forward to, anything to latch onto and continue to obsess over.
What does end up saving the rest of my night is either a trick or perhaps a meditation, it's hard to know what to call it, that I've stumbled upon during the years. It's sort of an emergency shut-off switch that I've never heard anyone else talk about nor have I've ever witnessed anyone else mention it on the Internet. I'll force myself to stop thinking. Stopping the torrent of words and feelings is obviously difficult and often it requires a few false starts for it to really succeed, but it's worth it to keep trying, it beats staying up half the night against my will. I'll take this command to and cram it in the center of my mind; like a sponge it will soak up the chorus that's there. But then once it works and all the thoughts evaporate, in their absence, other sensations will see it as an opportunity to trespass: random sounds, snippets of conversations I've never had with people I don't recognize, slowly gaining such a resonance that it's almost like hearing them in real life. It was frightening when this first started happening, but I'm used to it now.
After the sounds come the visuals, and it's the most confusing part: pictures of things I've never seen before, people I don't recognize, random corners of the earth that make little rhyme or reason as to why I should be seeing them, all these sights and sounds combine and somehow, I'm not in bed anymore. A city somewhere else, the woods, a room in a different house. It's more than a movie and it's very, eerily close to being in another place. But there's rules to it, like there is with so many things. If I focus my attention on any of the mise-en-scène, which feels like the obvious thing to do because you're taken aback by how vivid everything suddenly feels, the astral cord tugs and it immediately all disappears, like a popped balloon. It's vaguely frustrating because I've done this for years, and I still haven't grown any better at it. I can't allow my conscious mind to recognize in the moment what is happening in this situation. Almost, as if, any semblance of ego and self is incompatible with the experience. I don't know if other people do these things when they're just trying to go to sleep, maybe it's very common and we all just never discuss it. Not long after the scenes are allowed to run rampant and take control of me, I slip into unconsciousness.
However, there's one place in these exercises that I recognize and return to, much more often than most. It's the shores of what appears to be a large inland sea. It feels like a small distance past the end of all the roads, there are no buildings and no signs to be found, and it's very quiet. No litter blowing around, no sounds from passing cars. There are trees, but few, and everything that is and ever was throughout is just the rush of grass and the ripple of water, the waves dark and peaceful and enormous, vast. There are no boats on the water because the sea would not accept them. Nothing happens here, and it doesn't need to. It is a warm, always late golden afternoon, the rays from the sun resting on my skin like a caress I haven't experienced in awhile. It feels familiar, but nothing I recognize. It also feels slightly further away, just slightly out of reach from where any people have ever been.
At the shores of the sea, the atmosphere is one that seems to say that I don't belong there. Or at least not yet.
But I like it there. I wish I knew where the sea was, because I want to go in real life, to stand upon its shores, to look out in the horizon. Maybe it's a place that I saw on television at some point, conjured for no explainable reason, accessed and temporarily borrowed from the recess of buried memory. Still, I accept the possibility that it could be out there somewhere in a relatively untouched or abandoned part of the world. There's a lot that's been forgotten out there, if we care to remember it. We usually don't even have to travel very far. Most of the time we're occupied with tracing our usual paths, drawing lines on a map: to work, to school, the coffee shop. We forget there's so much emptiness out there.
Until then, I keep tracing my own lines. I live in the grid of my own making and, for the time being, it doesn't seem like I'm leaving it. But there's no point predicting the future, I've discovered that long ago. Maybe some other unforeseen event, an offer will materialize that's impossible to resist and worth transplanting myself away from here, but otherwise I'll still be more or less where I have been, now for so long. I do the best I can: taking in the seasons and making the best of them, maybe liking some of them better than others. I suppose that I'm meant to be here, for now, with everyone else around here passing through the hot to the cold swinging from one side to another, a pendulum.
And it will keep taking turns doing that, there and then again for so incredibly, almost immeasurably long after I'm gone.
In this part of the country there usually isn't very much snow but the air from the Arctic is relatively unchecked through the plains and dumps down upon us during the coldest part of the year. About two years ago, due to a mix of an unfortunate set of circumstances and a mix of my sometimes unhinged yet dogged determination, I found myself walking several miles back to my house when it was minus-ten degrees, with a wind chill reading of far worse. It was early morning on the kind of day where everyone collectively decided they were better off sleeping in late. Everywhere was a kingdom of ice. There was a hush that blanketed everywhere, covered everything, only the sound of my own footsteps grinding into layers of hardening frost and snow. Trying to walk as fast as I could so I could keep generating heat, the cold was relentless through my two layers of socks and waterproof winter boots, and a strange sleepiness would at times set in. It was strange; almost a siren's call to give up walking and have a rest. Thankfully, I still had the will to ignore the weariness and discomfort, and just force my brain to wander further than the aches then presently ravaging my corporeal form. After seemingly a small eternity and even with sunglasses on the glare from an outdoor canvas of overwhelming white made it nearly impossible to see once finally inside my apartment. In a mirror, the frost had settled on my eyelashes, the steam of soaked coats and hats, my eyebrows the silver of many tiny icicles forming from each individual hair.
I avoid taking a risk using my own car when the roads aren't great, and will take the city bus instead, and even to work, if it's necessary. The battery in my electric car doesn't do well in those extremes which is stressful enough; also over time I've become wary of the abilities of the other drivers around me during bad road conditions. I have no trouble steering into the skid on a patch of ice, but am I sure all the people around me can do the same? I've never been in a bad accident in the winter to where my paranoia could be perhaps deserved, but there's been some close calls over the years. I know enough where I don't want to be in a situation where I wasn't quite that lucky, and if avoiding that fate requires a certain amount of walking, so be it. The bus is free, plus it's warm and normally comfortable enough. On miserable days like those, one is just about the only passenger on the bus at all, where they're unbothered to just put in earbuds, stare out the window, and relax. It is a luxury, to not worry for awhile.
This was during the same winter, during another day, I was again on foot and en route to the bus stop. I had a very late-starting shift in an office on the other side of town, and even though I was walking in the middle of the afternoon and probably the warmest part of the day, the temperature was still only barely above zero. Not far from home, I came upon two little boys, quite young, on the side of the road. They were both crying.
And with children we'll often assume naturally that kids are just playing. But there's a difference here: less maudlin and more raw anxiety, and the hint of pain in their voices to where you realize, soon enough, that this could actually be a bad situation. And that you have to do something. I don't think that makes me a good person. Both the boys were dressed appropriately enough for the weather, minus gloves. On second glance, one boy appears a year or two older than the other. Their coats and hats looked secondhand, but capable. The smaller of the two is the loudest, it's almost a tantrum, directed at nothing or no one in particular. You never hear much about the rage of a wronged child, but it's there. I'm just maybe not a hopelessly bad person. Just like almost everyone else.
After approaching them and talking mostly to the slightly older boy, between the sobs, I put together what happened. They don't actually live around here, but use an address of someone they know who does live here in order to have the children go to school in this school district. In the morning they get dropped off to wait for the school bus, in the afternoon they leave school and the bus deposits them both back at the same stop, and normally their mother will be there to pick them up and go home, wherever that is. Except this day, their mother apparently didn't learn that the school was only open a half day, due to the weather. They were dropped off immediately after lunch. My brother doesn't much English, the bigger of the two says. Neither of them have phones. If what they said was accurate, they had been standing here on the side of the road for already about three hours, waiting for their mother. A kindergartener, a second grader. So many cars had driven past them.
It was such a relief to hear that the older child knew their mother's telephone number. I take my phone out of my coat pocket and call it immediately. After the generic voicemail prompt, I leave a detailed message and who I was, why I was calling, what apparently happened, and that I was going to take the children back to my apartment for whenever she can come get them. I said my address, my name, and left my phone number twice in the message. For the children's part, they agreed without any hesitation. I'm certain under any other circumstances, they wouldn't have come along with a complete stranger, but without saying as much to me it was obvious they understood the inherent danger they were in. The smallest one is crying that he can't walk. My blood flash freezes, I steady myself. Very seriously I ask him if he can feel his fingers and his toes and his cries start forming a word: yeah. I pick him up and carry him the couple hundred yards and up the flight of stairs going back to my place. I tell them my name and they give theirs, but they don't speak English very well and for the most part, it's hard to understand them. I decided that I was going to just call them both "buddy". It crosses my mind that even though doing this is realistically my only option, I'm rolling the dice on several things that could go wrong, that could end up happening to me just from giving a shit, like this. People can be opportunists, you know. People can be all kinds of things. Even if I got in some sort of trouble, I reckoned darkly, at least in my heart I'm aware that I really am doing the right thing.
I also call the North Kansas City police department. The first time I've ever called them specifically, but I felt like they needed to know what the heck was going on within their borders that day and if what I was doing was actually some kind of crime, we might as well just go ahead and get the whole matter over with. An older sounding woman answers the phone, who makes it clear not soon after the beginning after the phone call that she just answers the phone over there and is most definitely not an actual police officer. I explain the situation and she's like, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to leave them outside either. She asks for names of the children, of the mother, but I confess that I really can't tell what their names are. She asks why and I say that they're not great with English, I've asked names but I don't understand them, and that I think they might be Somali, if I had to guess. There's this pause and this oh, and it's the kind of oh reserved by certain white people having certain white people conversations that signals her understanding. I feel stupid about that, and vaguely guilty, but the way more important thing is that these kids are safe now, and warm, and drinking microwave hot cocoa with little marshmallows in it and are browsing Disney Plus. I tell them that they can take off their coats now, but they don't. They could still be feeling very cold. "Keep trying to get a hold of the mom," the woman says, "and if you don't hear anything by the end of the night, call back and we'll get Clay County down here."
Also I call my job to let them know that I probably won't be coming in today. Honesty isn't always the best policy, but I decide fuck it I'll just tell them the truth anyway. It was a brief conversation. They like me, but not very much. "Don't worry about it," they say, "and to be honest this sounds a lot like something that you would do anyway."
Sometimes I wonder where the actual truth is, when it comes to things. Maybe other people really don't see the point in rescuing children freezing in the cold, and they think that I'm somehow a strange person for doing it. Countless others already drove by these children in the freezing cold, all afternoon. I don't know. Or it could be that when other people hear about someone like me doing a thing on the surface so righteous that they feel insecure and uncertain about whether or not they would have what it took to rise to the occasion, themselves. Maybe the truth's someplace in the middle. I can't think about it. What does it matter, in the end.
Hours pass by. The boys don't talk much. I end up making everyone dinner, which is just chicken nuggets and cornbread with butter and honey. Ketchup instead of barbecue sauce. I wasn't prepared for this. Still they eat their food, and so quickly. The older one asks for seconds, and it's fine because I've made plenty, not really knowing on what side of the hunger spectrum either one of them ended up being on. I look at my phone on the other side of the sectional while they watch cartoons, occasionally asking them if I can get them anything at all; the answer is always no. Settling on some light reading on Reddit, I feel anxious. They still have their coats on and never asked to use my bathroom. Excusing myself away from them I try their mother again, telling her voicemail the same information, this time warning her about Clay County. I try to be as composed as I can in the message, but my anxiety grows. An uncomfortable possibility comes to mind: maybe this happened on purpose. Does this happen? Because if I received a random message like this one about my child, it wouldn't matter if I lost my job or not, I would jump in my car as I'm calling that person back, and break every traffic law on the way to get back to them as soon as I could. So where is she?
I think about my own daughter, at home warm and safe with her mother and her jerk boyfriend in another neighborhood, the last I knew. Even though she's a little older now than these kids, it's easy to insert a younger version of her in this very same situation. Picturing her waiting in the freezing cold with no one around makes my stomach lurch, and makes me ache that much worse for the two confused and scared boys in my living room. I always thought that as a parent, to some extent, you become a casual warden for all children. There is a lot of room for interpretation there, of course, and some parents seem to think differently about it than others, but I think at least we develop a certain empathy where we become more aware of the next generation, making sure they don't get hurt. It's reading a terrible news story about the unthinkable, then wondering "what if that was my child", then feeling an inch or two worse. Maybe it's an evolutionary thing, an innate parental drive that ensures your own young stay out of dangerous situations.
Later on, the youngest one is half-asleep on the coach with me, finally resting a bit. His face shows a child somewhat finally at peace, as I'm wondering what the lady at the police station meant specifically during our conversation when she said "by the end of the night". Then there's a very loud knock.
Suddenly put on notice, but assured that this was the mother - or someone - here to pick up these children, I get up. The boys quickly look at each other. I go to the front door and open it.
I don't look in the peephole beforehand.
There is a man, one in a very normal sense. Shorter than me and thin, but well put together. He looks related to the boys that are on the couch, but older. Has seen more, you can tell. His eyes are different than mine, of course human, but unrelated to me. I open the door and I look at him for a second and get ready to say hello.
"I...," he then says, as I have the door halfway open, and then snaps into action and, very aggressively, he forces his way into my home. The act is raw and physical but it is not meant as anything personal towards me. But that is not him paying me a kindness. In the scheme of things, I am nothing to him. I'm just in his way. It hurts, but not too bad. The picture that I framed that Ellie had drawn for me was knocked off the wall, the glass of the frame disjointed from its plastic enclosure. I'll have to get a new one. The cold from outside hitches a ride with him into my apartment, wafting around him. He walks into my living room, and both the boys are already getting up. The man says something in a snappy, authoritative tone in another language. The boys pick up the pace even more. Very clearly, they already know they need to abide by him, he's probably their father but I'll never know, and by the time I've gathered my wits to respond to what's happening in any meaningful way, they are all gone.
The television is still playing an episode of Doc McStuffins. The lights overhead shine over everything. It suddenly feels obscene. Their dinner plates still on the coffee table, half-drank glasses of juice and empty mugs of cocoa residue. It's snowing again outside, yet again.
As I said, there is a warm part of the year, and then a cold one.
I'll wake up hours before I'm supposed to. It happens a lot, far too often. Everything is always so quiet: sometimes in the distance there is an emergency siren or a large truck off in the distance but the rest of the time, just the resonance of my thoughts, mixed in with the leftovers of scattered dreams. The muffled void of the early hours in the city is a certain spell cast by the thousands of people around me, sleeping in every direction. At first I'll try to address any sort of biological need that might have forced me to wake in the first place and go back to sleep in a natural way, but that rarely works. It's all too still. There's always something to think about when these events give me an empty canvas, to worry about, or look forward to, anything to latch onto and continue to obsess over.
What does end up saving the rest of my night is either a trick or perhaps a meditation, it's hard to know what to call it, that I've stumbled upon during the years. It's sort of an emergency shut-off switch that I've never heard anyone else talk about nor have I've ever witnessed anyone else mention it on the Internet. I'll force myself to stop thinking. Stopping the torrent of words and feelings is obviously difficult and often it requires a few false starts for it to really succeed, but it's worth it to keep trying, it beats staying up half the night against my will. I'll take this command to and cram it in the center of my mind; like a sponge it will soak up the chorus that's there. But then once it works and all the thoughts evaporate, in their absence, other sensations will see it as an opportunity to trespass: random sounds, snippets of conversations I've never had with people I don't recognize, slowly gaining such a resonance that it's almost like hearing them in real life. It was frightening when this first started happening, but I'm used to it now.
After the sounds come the visuals, and it's the most confusing part: pictures of things I've never seen before, people I don't recognize, random corners of the earth that make little rhyme or reason as to why I should be seeing them, all these sights and sounds combine and somehow, I'm not in bed anymore. A city somewhere else, the woods, a room in a different house. It's more than a movie and it's very, eerily close to being in another place. But there's rules to it, like there is with so many things. If I focus my attention on any of the mise-en-scène, which feels like the obvious thing to do because you're taken aback by how vivid everything suddenly feels, the astral cord tugs and it immediately all disappears, like a popped balloon. It's vaguely frustrating because I've done this for years, and I still haven't grown any better at it. I can't allow my conscious mind to recognize in the moment what is happening in this situation. Almost, as if, any semblance of ego and self is incompatible with the experience. I don't know if other people do these things when they're just trying to go to sleep, maybe it's very common and we all just never discuss it. Not long after the scenes are allowed to run rampant and take control of me, I slip into unconsciousness.
However, there's one place in these exercises that I recognize and return to, much more often than most. It's the shores of what appears to be a large inland sea. It feels like a small distance past the end of all the roads, there are no buildings and no signs to be found, and it's very quiet. No litter blowing around, no sounds from passing cars. There are trees, but few, and everything that is and ever was throughout is just the rush of grass and the ripple of water, the waves dark and peaceful and enormous, vast. There are no boats on the water because the sea would not accept them. Nothing happens here, and it doesn't need to. It is a warm, always late golden afternoon, the rays from the sun resting on my skin like a caress I haven't experienced in awhile. It feels familiar, but nothing I recognize. It also feels slightly further away, just slightly out of reach from where any people have ever been.
At the shores of the sea, the atmosphere is one that seems to say that I don't belong there. Or at least not yet.
But I like it there. I wish I knew where the sea was, because I want to go in real life, to stand upon its shores, to look out in the horizon. Maybe it's a place that I saw on television at some point, conjured for no explainable reason, accessed and temporarily borrowed from the recess of buried memory. Still, I accept the possibility that it could be out there somewhere in a relatively untouched or abandoned part of the world. There's a lot that's been forgotten out there, if we care to remember it. We usually don't even have to travel very far. Most of the time we're occupied with tracing our usual paths, drawing lines on a map: to work, to school, the coffee shop. We forget there's so much emptiness out there.
Until then, I keep tracing my own lines. I live in the grid of my own making and, for the time being, it doesn't seem like I'm leaving it. But there's no point predicting the future, I've discovered that long ago. Maybe some other unforeseen event, an offer will materialize that's impossible to resist and worth transplanting myself away from here, but otherwise I'll still be more or less where I have been, now for so long. I do the best I can: taking in the seasons and making the best of them, maybe liking some of them better than others. I suppose that I'm meant to be here, for now, with everyone else around here passing through the hot to the cold swinging from one side to another, a pendulum.
And it will keep taking turns doing that, there and then again for so incredibly, almost immeasurably long after I'm gone.
