electrical stories.

The streets are wet, and silent, and dark. Everything has gone to bed, gone to sleep, gone to dream away the whys and maybes that confront them. I am awake. As is usual. I am walking the streets, my streets, full of promise and hope and regret and wariness. Small animals and dying trees line the sidewalk, continuing in their nervous existence, frightened out of their slumber by the wind and the thunder and the lightning. They are afraid of electricity, afraid of being jolted. I think I am too. Afraid of being too alive, too caught up beyond what I know. The future frightens me, its unknown quality intriguing and sacrosanct and desperate. How does one qualify their own short-term and long-term prospects within the parameters of what society expects? These are the worries that confront my programming.

I travel west, down my street and towards the hill. It's dark there, my eyes adjusting to the lack of lighting as I go, and the paved surface gives way, first to gravel, then to wet grass. Alive and aware of something else, something other, animals and insects scatter, and I continue on, nervous energy and bravado powering my batteries and a slight tremor betraying the chill I'm beginning to feel through my jacket. There is no moon, no stars, no planes, no lightning. Nothing in the sky but clouds and rain, water vapor and water. Do we know this? Does anyone? Do we know anything? Am I doomed to ponder these questions over and over, infinite loops between 10 and 20 goto 10 repeating in my processor until my power cells deplete and I pass on into the next arena? Or am I moving towards something else, some great epiphany that sits waiting in a valley or on a peak, or maybe in the midst of a vast plateau? I wonder.

The rain still falls softly, my face becoming wetter. I reach the foot of the hill and pause, for a brief moment, considering courses of action. Up, left, right. Or back. It's like life, actually. Forward, change course, or spend eternity looking back and wondering "what if?". I am a perpetual motion machine, always moving, always thinking, even when I'm standing still. Traveling without moving, to pull a quote. I see what needs to be done, I know what I need to do. Whether I do it or not, that is the trick question. I spend so long wondering that my chances pass by and I maintain my same position, hoping the chance comes around again. History recurs, after all, and I know that I can write my way out of anything I get myself into. I am looking up the hill, seeing the lights from the houses just over the edge, people asleep in them, people alive and moving and loving and dreaming in them. Do they know? Does anyone?

This is pointless, I know. Just another lost stargazer looking up and seeing a cloud-covered sky and wondering what's underneath it. Or above it. Perspective affects word usage. But I don't care, I am making my peace with my pointlessness, going from points A to B to C and back again in a recurring dream of usefulness. Everything is alive out here, everything is alive and noisy and silent and keeping on in its own way. I am alive, I am keeping on, I am standing still. Eyes forward, head on backwards, its all the same in the end. Forward, back, up, down, all perspective. The sky is up, the ground is down, and the way is forward.

Once upon a time, a man went up a hill, and came down the other side into another world. He asked the first person he met "Where am I? This place is unfamiliar and I don't recognize anything. It's all changed and different." The person, an older woman, smiled and said "You're in tomorrow, sir, and there's always going to be another one right over the next hill." And he, bewildered, thanked her and kept walking. Because some people can't conceive of another day, and some people can only think about the next one, and he was neither. He kept walking, kept climbing hills and emerging into new and different surroundings, and never getting back to where he was. Finally, after days and weeks of this, he stopped and sat down, half-crying and half-screaming to the sky "When does it end? I just want to be back where I was!" And the sky replied, "You can't. That is what was. This is what is. You can only go to what will be. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you will move forward." And the man stopped sobbing. He stood up, dusted himself off, and proceeded up the next hill.

I reach the top of the hill. The rain has stopped, and I see the school in the distance, and the houses and the shadows of people moving in them. I turn and look down, where I have come, into the dark of what was, and then look up into the clouded night sky, into the dark of what will be. It's all beautiful, and it's all what I was and will be. And am. I am what I have been and will be. And that is enough.

Reviews

[Arienas]

This is really beutiful, I love it and cant belive what how good this is, I hope you write more and soon it is very very good,