Darkness, insignificance, and orange windows..

I’ve always been able to find this certain unique sort of imaginative paradise; gusting groves of trees beneath gray skies, endless networks of far removed country roads, and old green suburban streets, to name a few.. These imaginative places, through either their own aesthetic perfection, or by some other divine means, generate this euphoric sense of both detachment and utter envelopment. They are transporting; drawing me downwards, through the fabric of given reality and into a deviant realm of isolated heaven. When one of these places catches my conscious mind I feel as though the hand of God is reaching up from the placid waters to pull my otherwise calm and neutral emotional state deep beneath the surface, wrapping it therein; cradled and drowning in divine care.

Like all things, however, there is a shady side to this particular moon of wonders; another direction in which this divine hand can pull me. As of yet I haven’t adequately logged any of these places, although they disturb me greatly. This first one began, innocently enough, on my first airplane excursion. I was a boy of five or so, and my next door neighbor happened to be a pilot. We had a family outing one day and went flying with the man, and I remember two things from that venture; first, the feeling of pushing the plane’s steering wheel forwards and backwards, and second, peering out of the window while landing at dusk, and catching sight of a strange neighborhood from far above. I remember the approach… sinking through the clouds, revealing the strangely symetric grid of the world. A million lights, a million people, and a million purposes stretched out into forever. As the sun set, and the plane got closer to the ground, I was just beginning to make out cars and road signs when I caught sight of an orange lit window. It was part of a dark house, who’s size and shape I could only allude to, and it’s sick glow radiated out over a quiet dead-end suburban street. The house at the end of the street was perched on a jagged hill, and a single yellow street light hunching beneath a canopy of trees marked it’s end. Between my position in the plane and the window there was nothing but blackness and obfusciated shapes, and the image of the seemingly random and insignificant rectangular orange glow filled me with a wonderous sort of anxiety and fascination. I wondered who the window belonged to, and pictured in my mind an array of haunting possbilities… a dirty cluttered home with unkempt gray shag carpet, walls stained yellow with decades of abuse, or perhaps the cozy well kept home of a lonely widow.. the possibilities were endless, yet none could escape a certain creepy yet-another-place-in-the-world-I’m-glad-I’m-not feeling. I wondered what the owners were doing while I peered down at them from the heavens, and I was suddenly filled with remorse at the information I yearned for, and would never satiate. I was also overcome with a sense of insignificance, not specifically towards myself, but towards everything, which would be a theme that would forever haunt me from that moment forward.

Nowadays, while traveling, my eyes will periodically catch sight of random lit windows far off in the darkness, and suddenly I’m transported back to that seat in the plane…peering into one of a million random homes in the world, thanking fates that I’m not stuck in one of them; that I’m not as insignificant as all those tiny specks of light that are scattered across strange places. Eventually I return home, only to lay on my neatly organized bedside peering out the window, up at the sky, wondering if anyone overhead happens to be looking down at my orange glowing bedroom light, thanking the fates that they’re not as insignificant as all that.