1st Monday Genre: Fiction
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Spring, when it finally came, was a surprise. Spring was the season of renewal, of rebirth, and of release from the consistency of Winter. Spring in Corbin wore many faces. It was the time of warm rains and icy sunlight. It was the time of slow mornings and long afternoons. It was the moment of promise and the realization that we may already have been too late.
Spring was the season when the dreams started. The dreams were something more than just a continuation of the day that was suppose to have been left behind in favor of rest. To Beck the dreams felt like glimpses into alternate realities. He felt like he was living lives he didn’t know or understand or even want. Whole conversations were played out in his restless mind. Challenges were answered. Battles fought and sometimes won, but just as often they were not. Love was given. And taken. And lost.
Waking from the dreams—one night joyful and full of hope, another night disheartened and confused—Beck would leave his bed, dress, and walk beneath the stars. At that time it was dark here in Corbin, and the stars shown with such brilliance that they seemed to be making up for all the lights in all the cities that caused them to be blotted out and forgotten. Beck had lived on the farm long enough now, almost a year, and he was able to see the march of the stars across the night sky. Most nights he would think about the dreams and try to understand them in the context of those points moving silently in the blackness. The dreams sought comfort and security in the idea that he was the stationary one, that he was the anchor around which all those points spun and danced and shimmered. The dreams chipped at his idea of the here and the now. They clamored for him to cling to those things that would make his heart and the world stop spinning.
But Beck knew that the stars were the stationary ones. He knew that they only appeared to be tilting and traveling through the night. They were the ones set into the pattern of the heavens, and he was the one shifting, sliding, tumbling in the void and the blackness. Navigating at night is an act only possible if someone understands his own movement with respect to the stars. Beck knew he would be forever lost if he became completely untethered from the stars and the earth, from the cycle of the seasons, and from the seemingly endless tomorrows but which are only always today.
As the dreams increased in frequency and intensity Beck began to notice a flickering around the people he encountered in town and his neighbors around the farm. As he talked to them, as he shook their hands and listened to them, he began to see other eyes in their faces and hear other voices in their mouths. It was confusing at first, a cacophony of words and a collage of overlapping images and figures whenever he was with anyone else.
This sense of flickering blossomed that Spring on the farm. It increased with each day he spent there, with each day he spent alone. He’d read somewhere about a room at some college that, from its construction and its materials, was the quietest room in the world. The walls and the floor and the ceiling cleanly soaked up sound. It was in some incomprehensible way a vacuum, a hollowness in the world, empty of vibrations, with no points in the distance to guide the inhabitant home. Apparently, the human mind is not wired for this kind of deprivation. The minds of people in the room would, out of a sort of desperation, create sounds and vibrations all on their own. Left alone the mind brings stimuli in to being. When deprived, the mind will create a new reality unto itself to fill the gap.
After reading about the chamber, Beck began to wonder if the dreams and the flickering experiences he had with other people were his own mind forcing or creating or grasping for other realities. Perhaps his mind was demanding more from the world than Beck was willing to give it, was willing to let in. His world, the world of the farm and of Corbin, was one that he kept leashed and contained. He constrained the world to keep it small and local and tight. During those walks in the darkness amid the stars he came to realize that he had cultivated the conditions in which he would one day be forced to choose which of his flickering visions of reality he would acknowledge, which he would trust, and which he would let evaporate with the dawn. One day he would have to decide or remain, lost, among stars.
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text © Andy Engel, 2016
