Time And Space

There is a special quality to the darkness here, a silver blue tinge to the black as if crystalline. Kaleidoscopic pinpricks of light spit the night sky, microscopic mica in black granite. From where I lie, it's not clear which bodies reflect light and which produce their own heat; which bodies are driving forward the relentless expansion of the universe and which are retelling the story. The latter are the ones slowly fading into their own darkness. Somewhere up there is another planet like our own, perhaps with people just like us, with the chance to make different decisions.

I feel the cooling earth on my back, but I know that the coldest part of the night is closer to dawn. I camped once and felt the cold rising very slowly along the shortest path through my torso before the sun rose. For now, the ground supports me. There is a symmetry to the sky, and I reach my arms out to both sides, hoping there is no symmetry to the ground, but of course there is, of a sort. Both hands stroke grass, but there are subtle differences in the length, the texture and the presence of foreign bodies. I see how the night sky reflects this subtle crack in the symmetry. As I search the brightest stars I make out constellations, patterns unique to a specific sector. They have names I do not know.

It's like when we lay in the summer sun in a flowered meadow, watching the clouds drift slowly across the sky, their movement imperceptible to the impatient observer. Lying there, we picked out clouds and named them for the animals and countries they imagined, tracing their path as they morphed into something different. And then it was dark. Where had the day gone?