perspective

There is this place where there’s a rock in front of a big pond and one evening I sat on the rock. It was moist and slippery because it was drizzly out but it was one of those days where it didn’t really matter much to me if the seat of my jeans got wet or if my hair was frizzier than usual or if the world was crashing in upon itself like a slow motion video of an unwanted skyscraper with its crevices filled strategically with dynamite. Sometimes stuff like that doesn’t seem important and maybe that’s the way it should be.

Dusk was creeping over the lake and a billowing cloud of blue-gray mist trailed along in its footsteps like an admiring little brother. Mist wishes it could be as cool as dusk but it will always be stuck in its shadow. It’s the darkness that people fear. Mist muffles the light but its connotations will never surpass anything beyond eerie mystery. Dusk signals the approach of something much more terrible, like a trumpet heralding the beginning of a long, bloody battle. It doubts the sun and light and hope like water doubts the flame on a match.

There’s something about a still, smooth surface of a lake on a quiet, starless night. There’s almost never an absence of wind in Newfoundland and when there is it’s because something out there is trying to tell you something and to understand it you have to sit on a wet rock in the dusk and the mist and the hushed enigmatic serenity and listen.

A few times in your life everything will fall wonderfully into perspective. It might be the wrong perspective. You might change your mind some day. You might decide to follow a different path. You might lose your way. You might get trapped in some horrible abyss of obscurity and spend the remainder of your life talking to daisy’s or planting mittens to grow mitten trees or breeding termites or something. Or it all might come to an abrupt end that will give no respect to your perspective. But when it does all come together in that one moment and everything ahead of you and behind you and inside you begins to become meaningful in some new and real way, it feels so impossibly perfect.