Nabokov

Last night, I fell asleep in my weathered yellow recliner, an ugly and comfortable relic of my childhood.  I awoke before sunrise, energy crackling through my veins.  I pulled on a light flannel and threadworn jeans, and walked to a place where the heavily wooded nature preserve tentatively meets the meadow.

It’s autumn, now, and cold in the morning.  My breath fogged the night blue, before dissipating an airy death in the light breeze.  There was a harvested feed corn field to my right, to the east, and I turned to consider it.  Warm orange fingers were kneading the night away, and when the wind hits me and my eyes well with brine, the tenuous threads of light beam out into infinity.  I remember Nabokov on a warm day in the spring, in the nook of a tree where the meadow meets the marsh: …And common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  I feel eternal, I feel surreal, I feel temporary–I feel like I’m puddling out into the unseen and undreamed.  The larks are quiet and the waking world hushed, but we’re all bobbing our heads and tapping our feet.

I worry that I feel too much wonder for the world to represent it correctly; I worry that I don’t do enough to fulfill my potential, my filial and rightful duty to the world; I worry that I do too much, and that I’m moving too fast to see anything but blurs of color and hear snips of soundbytes.  I worry that what I’m capable of is not commensurate to what I want to do, and I worry that the beauty of the world is beyond the capacity of my wonder.  Even so, I watch a doe spring across the treeline, its bottomless eyes untainted by the fears that could govern it–of a rifle around the corner, of a wolf over the meadow’s crest.  She is reveling in her nature, in nature, even if she does not realize it.  She is reveling in it vicariously through me, even if she can’t understand that.  I count the dots on her back like she’s the last bouncing die in a game of craps, and I try to predict it.

I am happier now than I have ever been, hungrier now than I could have ever imagined, and I’m running my fingers over the place where a crack of light meets an eternity of darkness, and that line is a language beyond my head that every other part of me understands.