We are unnatural. Why should we not too slip inside the shadows and see?

Retrace the thoughts. Run backwards from the end. Search, memory, impulses, feelings and sensations. Probe along in the darkness, searching for the ahha moment. Searching for something that makes sense, an image. A still evening with a tree.

.

Took up sitting in the front window watching the neighborhood again. It’s easier to look out than it is to look in. People coming and going, extrapolations of lives I don’t know, I don’t have to care about, that I don’t have to manipulate to make it rewarding.

After some time I decided to take a walk. The twilight was falling, the sun having just set below the mountains, the sky a really beautiful shifting canvas. The clouds covered the sky, thick but cracked, layered and vast, almost bubbly. Some were a stormy gray, others caught the fallen sun’s light and shone in a blue or purple, the sky from one point to another in an ever changing gradient, back and forth, as if shimmering standing still and frozen.

The air was cool, not in the way that produced shivers along your back, but the kind that’s refreshing to step out into after a hot day cooped up inside. I felt as if I could walk for hours.

I strolled in a long circle around the neighborhood, following the road that looped around, apartment buildings scattered throughout, the office and swimming pool at the center. When I came around the bend that opens up on the north side to a broad grassy area ending in a ditch far off behind a shopping center, I stopped and sat down.

I’d never noticed from my apartment how big the trees were here. They reminded me of home. Leafy and full, dark now that the evening was upon us, they filled the air above and around me with a kind of comforting thickness, a feeling at once both pleasant but constricting, surrounding, almost hot without a change in temperature.

I coughed.

Knee jerk reaction in my throat. Like being smothered with a pillow I gasped for breath, swallowed a lot. The air felt humid – different from the air back home in Philly, where summers would sometimes shut you down for weeks, AC on blast if you were lucky enough to have an apartment outfitted, even the trees wilted, the old buildings bearing down with a pretense that this has happened before.

My vision went slowly with my eyes, as if I’d had two beers on an empty stomach already. I tried to swallow again but my mouth was parched. Too dry. Too dry.

A deep breath again,

and then I saw him.

He was standing next to a tree watching me. As best I could tell. He was a silhouette, a black mass, ebony shaded to only fill in the lines. No planes or contours to hint at clothes, a face, the curvature of a body. Two dimensional, flat, meaningless. But at once important.

He was watching me.

There was something funny about the way he stood too. Legs spread apart probably about shoulder width. Arms dangling at his sides, awkward. He wasn’t leaning on the tree casually. He wasn’t taking in the evening. He was taking in me. With no uncertain way about him.

Otherworldly? Was that how I’d describe him? Separate. Different. The night was falling all around us both but he seemed to be unaffected by it all, his edges crisp, his form darker than even the now-lengthening purple shadows. I wondered if I were to stay if he’d still be darker than the black shadows behind the trees when the night had fully dropped, a sheet over, a beacon of black like a flashlight illuminated, something standing altogether apart.

He turned, toward the tree next to him, and stepped behind it, not appearing on the other side.

This seemed perfectly natural to me. It did not shock me when he didn’t continue on his way on the right side of the tree. Of course he’d just closed himself up, slipped flat, and slid in between a hole or a slash in this world, lightening, dissipating into the shadows. In the same way that you place something between you and the sun, the shadow befalls you, a darkness fully more natural than the light, of course when he stepped behind the tree he’d be gone.

Just like the rest of us would, I thought. Just like the rest of us would if we let go.

At once, just like the final image of a dream, remaining with you as you wake up, the rest only a roadmap or journey along the way, a retraced pattern with points you reach, a thought occurred to me as the air loosened, a fresh cool blast slipping against my skin as it upped and lessened.

We human beings are the unnatural. Not plastics or pollution, my mind shuffled the thoughts in a blur. Not penthouse suites or money or fame or fast cars or sex or drinking or desperation for vacations in a six by six white paper cube. These are our productions. And we are unnatural. Why should we not too slip inside the shadows and see?

The thought lingered, my mind turning it over as I slowly picked myself up and wandered back to the apartment, each step seeming too slow, a walk underwater, but without the pressure of before. Time was just moving different.

Why should we not?

What was that?