A Pondering.


It's snowing again. The world outside is bathed in dim white, the ground can hardly be seen through the thick fog. White above and white below. I have not bothered to close the shades on my windows even though night is falling. No one will be able to see in, I can barely see out. There's a road out in the valley that has disappeared, only the fuzzy distant glow of headlights betrays it existence. And now, even those lights have disappeared. The fog has grown thicker.


There was a night, a while ago, when the moon was full and shone brightly, hiding all the stars. I walked out to my balcony to gaze out at the valley and lose myself in thought, but there was no valley, only an ocean of misty clouds that stretched from my window to the ends of the earth. I felt suddenly alone in the world and strangely disconnected from everything alive. Had I been as insubstantial as a cloud, I would have stepped out of my window and walked to the moon. As I watched, the clouds swirled and the mist slowly rose like the rising of an ocean tide, giving the moon a large silvery halo that drew me as distinctly as a single far off light on a dark, cold night. I would swim to the moon if I could, but I found myself cruelly locked to the floor and bound there forever by the laws of science. The mist continued to rise until the outlines of the moon were blurred and then finally hidden from view. The world outside my window grew formless and dark. With no light to show the way, I grew disoriented and imagined that the sky was downward and the earth was up. What if the laws of science continually pulled my feet up into the sky and the floor of my house was actually the ceiling? I knew the repercussions of such and idea were ridiculous but the thought was amusing. And so I lost myself in thought as I watched the shifting mist play games with things I had always known to be fact.