DARKNESS AT THE EDGE OF TOWN

 

All those messages, people with opinions, and there is the shadow of a Miranda girl having one as well, but sometimes her words fall away like the end of an autumn storm, a few light showers, and then just moisture that can’t even form a tear drop of rain.
 

A few people wrote that I was immoral after I posted a quote I didn’t even notice had something potentially controversial in it. But I get that a lot. It’s stranger when someone says I’m some kind of holy person. Really, there’s not much anyone can say that seems like it's addressed to any person at all.

Sometimes people laugh and sometimes they cry here at the silent retreat. It’s like little cartoon panels with the place for the words empty, as I’ll never know what is bringing tears or the laughter. But then, no one knows, even if they have a story about it. Even with a million words and thoughts and explanations,  you will never know why you seem to laugh or cry any more than you know why the stars blink in the dream of sky when you get up in the middle of the night and look up and wonder what you are.

The landowner emails Fiona and me to ask if he should buy some land in a warmer climate. Maybe he can set up a retreat in California, where people can lie in the sun and do yoga instead of the cold and wet of the mossy forest. But this is a magical place, Fiona writes him back. It’s true, and everyone knows that sea monsters and fairies have long been extinct in California.

People sometimes write and practically beg me to say just the really nice and pretty things, and I get that. They are all, old as some of them seem in the dream of age, just little children sobbing into their pillow about what they believe is the cruelty of a world they never made. Maybe all that is cruel is that they somehow have the strange power to imagine a world that exists only in their thoughts, a world where what happens is just what they want to happen. But really, they are already living in a world of their imagination. It’s the only world they will ever know, it’s just that it isn’t, and wasn’t, and won’t ever be, “their” world.

These are not even the remains of the day, and the woman painter, who we rarely see, is playing a plaintive violin in the main cabin. It echoes like the cry of all the lost imaginary dreamlings whose tears flood the streets of their cities and towns with hopes and fears and all those things that now disappear into the darkness of what is not even nothing or everything or something else; just a memory of a life no one ever lived and a love no longer speakable …. and yet, look, my eyes are filled with tears… 💓