Unchanging

A hideous vision assaulted me tonight.

It didn’t come during the early stages of late-evening…that small window of time when the last remaining bar-goers stumble into the all-night corner stores; when couples lie in the drained darkness after a satisfying bout of carnal relations; when the sirens of the ambulances cease their call, and maintain a silent strobe instead; when the last of the corner bedroom lamps click off, and the sprinklers in the parks and lawns click on. No, it was not during this friction point, and had it been so, I may have found a bit of comfort in the knowledge that there were other presences lurking about. That somewhere nearby someone was having some form of an effect on the world– an outside influence other than my own…for when the vision struck me it was in the the rarely-ventured bottom of the evening, in that one hour lull before the waking of the birds, when even the most intransigent of night owls have succumbed to the soft embrace of slumber.

As it happened, I was standing in the middle of a broad parking lot, in summer attire, with twisted socks and undone laces. I clutched a bottle of water, put it to my lips, and tipped it back…taking in both the cold and refreshing liquid, and the empty beckoning sky. The moon therein cast a blinding silver veil across the stars, and as I gazed, and drank, a wind kicked up hard and fast…searing my exposed hands like bacon on a grill. The indifferent sky grabbed my gaze in an instant, and I felt reality warp and distort around me. Visions of a frozen north-land invaded my thoughts; a road encapsulated with ice, plains of snow on either side, myself in a car. I watched the road before me disappear first under slush, then under a channel of slate colored water as I drove…every trace of humanity disappearing behind me as the cold embrace of some misplaced ice-age consumed it.

Frightened, I grappled to return to myself, and succeeded…partially. I found myself back in the parking lot, but my grip on time was loose. The heavens whirled and laughed, and I watched both events past, and events that had yet to supervene the present, transpire; a christmas party in a hall long burned down, the glitter of lights on it’s old spider webbed windows, old couples dancing as I mingled unnoticed around their legs…an array of unfamiliar futuristic buildings and vehicles, with strange adult faces younger than I had thought possible, running the works like a fresh generation of bees, whose previous colony held no meaning whatsoever, and had in fact been completely forgotten.

Somewhere in this sea of past and future I found my trite and insignificant consciousness floating frightened and adrift, and I latched on to it, in spite of the maddening call of the moon to abandon any notions of personal grandeur. Though feeble, I was able to hold on to the unique pulse of my own mind, slowly unreeling myself from the nightmarish day dream as visions of my own past and present flashed before my eyes– both equally horrible in opposing ways.

I came to and found myself alone in the parking lot once again. A silent town. A breath of winter.