When the Light is Gone

When the Light is Gone

The ruins recognize nothing. History maybe, but you can forget about love, forget about belonging. Don’t think about the past, it already existed, it has happened with absolute certainty, nothing in the world can erase it.

It is the dead of night and I am alone. Comfort is a distant memory and the ruins are my only company. They tower and they bend, but nothing seems to change them. Rage and despair are obscure dreams, the only truce between us and rage is resignation to what has occurred.

You can never erase what has happened. The city is in ruins and the ruins will last forever.

Your only choice is to walk. Walk along the road that has beckoned you. The road was dusted with snow and lined with the gaping maws of buildings you once visited. And you know you can never go back again. You can never again sit in the theatre seats, the diner is closed, the grocery store, all of it. The world closed and nobody noticed.

The ruins are so prominent that you can forget where you are.

The train station in ruins; the operator’s phone lines still dangling from the ceiling. The ruined arches still hanging in the city streets, the forsaken houses standing empty. Big empty Victorian facades left to rot and decay, nature taking over for man, as it is wont to do. And what nature desires, nature gets.

The walk has gone on long enough, the cold is biting, and the pavement hard. There is a barn at the end of High St.., undestroyed and vacant. I don’t know if it was a barn or factory. Memory is fickle and unreliable. All of the semi-ruined buildings blend together. Actually, they were not semi-ruined. The ruin was complete, but we don’t have an understanding of that. Until you see it.

When I say it was a barn or a factory, I mean it did not matter. In such states of disrepair, buildings lose their meaning, their purpose. When structures become husks it can be difficult to imagine their prior purpose. There is a reason things stop functioning, we just don’t know it. We are proven masters of calamity, perfect amateurs in understanding. The opacity of our existence would be truly frightening if we had any inkling of the complexities of its meaning.

But the arches and vaults blended together. And the majesty was present. And the cold was outside. The interior suggested something important, but it was lost on me. I can see the majesty, but not the history. The only escape was my own head.

History is dead and gone. No one is capable of retrieving it. The darkness was extreme but mitigated by the street lamps outside. The orange glow of a sodium lamp is one thing you can always count on. A patchwork of illumination broke up the shadows, but the intrusion of nature had turned the building into a crypt. But no one was resting there; no one had departed, but time certainly had. We place so much primacy on our dominance, but in reality, we are just mere creatures in the spectrum of nature. Rats and humans have that in common, however, rats will outlive all of us.

When I first saw the owl, it was alighted on a large windowsill – poured concrete stained with rust and soot from a long-forgotten fire. The bird’s white face and black eyes stood out against the background of a broken window; framed by a diffuse halo of yellow light through the shattered glass.

Owls are very rare in this region. My encounter was not an accident but I cannot actually confirm with any confidence that it was real. But I know what it meant. Meaning is not a common occurrence in the appraised life. But the white face and the large black eyes were intended for something. The barn owl and I fixed our glances on each other – the steam from my breath was suffocating, rising steadily, and the freezing air choked my breath. My hands shook from the cold as I looked at the owl and it looked back at me.

The owl’s eyes held a searching emptiness that I still cannot understand. And I don’t think I ever will. Some things are so enveloped in darkness that attaining understanding is contrary to existence. Recognizing that is not progress though, it is just the divestment of unnecessary hope; hope so hollow that it can’t be anything but an exercise in futility. Life can take most things, but it can never take that recognition, that belongs to you forever.

Virtually motionless, the owl did not blink. There were no comforting sounds, just the echo of distant traffic from the high walls and the hiss of the wind outside. It was strongly quiet though, these streets are mostly vacant at night. However, like all silence outside of the wilderness, it is punctuated by noise.

We are just waiting for the noise to stop, when it stops, it signifies the end, and mankind does not possess enough terror to reconnoiter that.

I grew tired with standing still – that endless restlessness – and I left the floor, cluttered with defunct industrial devices and the walls crawling with weeds. I addressed the barn owl, the specter with the phantom face and obsidian eyes:

“You’re far too late,” I said, and the barn owl flew away, leaving no trace as it passed through the broken and tarnished glass. And I was no worse for it, or any better, I simply was. The world was devoid of recourse and solutions.

There is so little light here.