A Quiet Walk

The skyglow is eerily beautiful. The clouds that hug the horizon are tinged pink, a strange sight over the completely dark streets I walk through. Kenmore is notorious for its power outages; every fall the windstorms come and knock the power out for a few days at a time, leaving at least two or three nights every year smelling like rich wood smoke and feeling like cold sheets. I always try to take a walk when the power is out, it both helps set my mind at ease and somehow reminds me of just how large the world really is. Or perhaps it alters my perspective of these streets I have walked for nearly two decades; the same pavement, the same houses, the same trees, but seen with fresh eyes, in a light, or lack thereof, seen so rarely it becomes beautiful strictly for its scarcity.

The dark is not complete though; small pinpoints of light dot the porches I walk past, accompanied by the hum of generators tucked away in the corners of yards. As I walk, my mind is allowed to wander down the quiet, soft paths that match the world around me; I daydream as I normally do of impressing the girl I love, growing closer and closer to her. These daydreams are never about sex, nor even the kiss. The feelings welling up in my chest all are birthed from the foreplay; my meandering poetic descriptions and slightly off kilter observations of life and its goings on that hopefully impress and eventually make her feel like I do. My mind stops as I can almost feel the warmth of her hand in mine, I can almost see her eyes as they sparkle with happiness and a small amount of nervous excitement, I can almost taste the rapidly shrinking air between our lips, but I dare not tread any further. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of knowledge; all I know is that I know nothing of the future.

I take a few blocks to think about my professional future. I had a professor once mention that we as humans only have words. We experience emotions, feelings, thoughts, dreams, and so much more of what makes life worth living, but all we have are words to describe them. Love, friendship, travel, memories, all make the human experience so unique and beautiful and infinitely complex, and the most pure way we know to share those things is through art. Songs, poetry, painting, are all attempts to make physical the formless, to describe the indescribable. Yet they never even come close. As a poet I am a professional failure, forever chasing the impossible. There are over a quarter of a million words in the English language, and yet there is no way that I can put them in any order that would even remotely begin to explain how I feel when looking into her eyes. In much the same way, the overcast skies are a crescendo of grays and whites that breathes, flows, and evolves with every passing second; forming cathedrals of smoke, worlds of muted color utterly unexplorable, a masterpiece above our head that the greatest painter in the world could never hope to replicate. But they push forward. Every day they put paint to brush, and brush to canvas. Professional idiots attempting the impossible. Not for money, nor for acclaim, but because they have to. They feel the call. They must paint like I must write and you must breathe. I once asked my dad if he had ever thought about quitting golf. He told me he would quit the day he played the perfect round; made every read, hit every shot perfectly. I asked if he thought that could happen, he told me he had never even come close. I suppose we are all chasing the impossible in our own way. We as a human species are a delightfully tenacious bunch. Perfection is unattainable yet we lace our boots up every day and give it our goddamn best. Everyday we fail, some days we fail spectacularly, yet we open our eyes tomorrow ready to try again. I will spend the rest of my life putting pen to paper, using and abusing these useless words in an attempt to convey a fraction of what I feel as I write, and I will fail. Over and over again I will fail with a smile on my face and a flutter in my chest. Because I am a human. Because I am a professional failure, and I know no other way.

The woman in the purple sweatshirt gets closer. Her eyes are fixed straight ahead, her shoulders square, her stride consistent. I wonder if she sees the dark like I do, I wonder if she feels the amazement that I do seeing a sky with no light pollution. I wonder if she sees the sky at all. She feels my eyes on her and glances over. We exchange polite half-assed smiles, and continue on our respective ways. As she passes, the sonder hits me in waves of increasing power: she is a human being. She has hopes and dreams, fears and triumphs. She has done great things, things she is proud of, things she is ashamed of. She has goals as lofty as mine, memories as vivid as my own. Maybe there is a man in one of those memories, a man who has calloused hands and a coarse chin, whose embrace smells like aftershave, and feels like home. Maybe there is a girl with bright eyes and a beautiful smile, whose freckles are numerous, whose hair smells like strawberries, and whose embrace was worth the pain of childbirth and the sleepless nights. But I will always wonder; does she see the sky?

My footsteps continue almost silently through this sacred dark night. A slightly cool breeze disturbs the air around my neck and erects the hairs on my exposed skin. The dark and quiet evening pushes my mind to fill in the stillness with thoughts, fears, hopes, adventures. Maybe I will wake up 10 years later dancing in the kitchen with her one Sunday morning, prancing around in our underwear as the pancakes on the stove slowly blacken. Maybe I will leave this country, wake up and look out onto the oceans of grass of a land far away as the gray billowing clouds insulate the countryside like a snow globe of thoughtful melancholy. Maybe I will waste away in a cubicle, freeze to death in a gutter, be broken down then built back up by a drill sergeant. Maybe I will see the world, maybe the world will see me. All that I want out of this life is for my voice to be heard. And on these dark nights, I begin to feel like maybe the world is ready to listen.