Portrait of a Moment

[Finch]

I stand at the place where the water meets the sand. My eyes are closed but for the first time, it seems, I am truly seeing the world for what it is.
I drove here, without purpose or effort. I can’t remember for sure what route I took or why. With no idea where I was going I followed the headlights of my car, which chased the white lines on the road as though they hunted the tracks of an unknowable quarry. Swept onwards by the wash of recent events that culminated in a sense of detachment and nihilist terror. My hands gripped the steering wheel, knuckles skeletal and made surreal by the ghostly light cast by the dashboard.
A question concerning death, and all the connotations usually associated with the veil we all must cross, had shaken me to the very core of my being. No other certainty grips a man’s heart with the iron fist of terror quite so much as the cessation of life and the enigmatic uncertainty of what awaits the soul upon our passing. The only barrier that protects us from such thoughts is the power of our imagination over the logical mind. When our most potent defence against the mystery of death is swept aside, for whatever reason, an answer must be given, lest hope be snuffed out as easily as a stricken match.
A realisation struck me just as the road offered a place for respite. I had to swing about and thrust myself at full speed toward the odious cloud that had attached itself to me. A reckoning must take place between myself and this formless abstract, either grapple with it and cast it aside or be absorbed by that monstrous creature of thought and metaphor.
I leapt out of the car, engine sputtering to a halt. Keys in hand I ran to the top of the nearest dune, hurling myself up the dust which crumbled, closing eagerly around my footfalls. It wanted me to stay, it wanted to drag me down that night and crush me in its jealous embrace. The lifeless earth wanted life for itself, my life, but I wouldn’t allow it. I reached the top and stopped. Warm, salty sea air, carried by a gentle zephyr, caressed the folds in my clothes as though welcoming a sail cloth and bade me to pause. I gratefully accepted the hiatus and raised my face upward in gratitude, my eyes closed in thought.
So I stood there, my thoughts tempestuous and possessing a temper geared for combat against my own worries for those I once knew and who had departed to whatever comes next. A heavy brow and heavy heart, ready to face the demons which had hounded me to these very shores. I stopped and listened mutely, listening for the wind to whisper a solution to my plight.
Have you ever listened to the sound of waves crashing against the sandy shore, I mean really listened? It’s fascinatingly complex. The sound starts slowly, softly. It is a million grains of sand being dragged across sand by the softest and most patiently destructive of the elements, dragged back toward the sea from where all we know originates. It’s suspenseful, that quiet sound that runs feathery fingers up the spine and across the base of the neck. It hangs in the air, drawn out until it attenuates as the retreating wave is forced away from the beach by the absolute force of gravity. It becomes softer, until there is barely a suggestion of a susurration, holding the focus of attention on that quickly retreating whisper of water and earth.
There’s a moment then where there exists only silence, a pause growing pregnant with anticipation, as though waiting anxiously for the return of movement and sound. You can get lost in that moment. It sucks you in and holds you, unwilling to part companies. If you allow it, hold the moment offered to you, the silence becomes so consuming that it seems as though an absence of existence should come racing out like fire escaping wood.
This silence. It could be here to stay. Forever casting the world into a void so complete that not even the shattering of our star could break it. A blanket upon society that would destroy the very fabric our relationships are built upon. Mouths on our loved ones faces forever soundless O’s hanging open in a frantic, defiant but useless panic.
The imminence of this malevolent silence looms heavily from this world of hush, jealous of the warmth of frequency caressing our undeserving human imaginations. It shows through, a shadow of palpable evil ready to choke the words in our throats before they can even be born, ready to paint despair forever upon the faces of our children.
A crescendo of sound rips me out of The Gap, a place between worlds, and casts itself over my entire body in a successfully heroic attempt to force back the nothing. A new wave hurling itself energetically upon the restful beach. A thousand cymbals clashing in unison, hydrogen and oxygen in such quantities that a billion drips becomes a single boom, all working in organic solidarity toward the same end. Locked eternally in a cycle that begins anew every second.
I was slowly beginning to realise something. A whole new universe was being created by my perception in the void between my emotional turbulence and rational understanding. This warmer and far more complex universe seemed to inherently suggest comfort and understanding without effort, stars and galaxies creating fractal alphabets; spelling out in grandiose demonstrations too obvious to be seen through the chaotic random contradiction that is human thought.
There is always this, I thought to myself, a mystery that changes each time you look at it. A new experience, if I take the time to observe.
I opened my eyes and looked toward the distant gloaming horizon, my mind and mouth agape. My imagination was held in a state of rapture, brought into being by the intensity of realisation. The world seemed to be wearing a mask of such exquisite design that at once reality seemed to be both as impenetrable as a gilded whisper and as frustrating as the foxing on ancient canvases.
Before me was a flawless mirror reflecting a sky tinted heavily by darkness. The mirror, suspended by an ocean so calm it appeared to be sleeping. Far out to sea, there was only the faintest ripple to disturb this dream, and the stars danced like diamond shoals swimming languidly beneath the mercurial surface. It was as though I was seeing deeper into the mechanics of the universe, but only seeing one aspect of the meta-workings depending upon my emotional or logical vantage point.
The dawning realisation struck me by the time my gaze reached the globe of the sky hanging above. I saw how tiny I was, how insignificant anything I could become in this life was in the face of an indifferent, unimaginably large universe. Standing within a wizard’s sphere, feeling like Arthur in one of Merlin’s cryptic lessons, I observed the start and end point of all our existences. I remembered been told once that we are never more than 5 meters from Nelson’s last breath and I pondered the story of the nine cities of Troy, each civilization built upon the ruins of the last.
They say that when our bodies are laid to rest inside the womb of the earth, we become once more, a part of it. From there, through natural process, we become the plants, trees, and fruit. We become the animals that feed off them until a small part of us becomes human once again, perhaps carrying a small part of the essence of our souls into a new cycle of self reflection. Furthermore, millions of years into the future, Sol, our sun, will be unable to maintain its stability and what is left of us after the nuclear fury of a dying star, will once more be spread out into the cold void of the cosmos.
What of us then? Planets bearing the life of billions of souls or the random asteroids poised to wipe them out? Life giving stars that other people could bask in the heat of, or grow crops by? Perhaps even galaxies until, in an infinite number of years and existences renewing with each step the cycle of creation and destruction, we become the universe.
I hadn’t stumbled across the meaning of life or even a definite answer to the question of the soul, an answer I was seeking to find that night. What I found instead was a small comfort that went further than any religion or belief could claim to give me.
The legacy of our bodies will far outlive the memory of the accomplishments of the greatest architects. The evolution of our ashes lasting longer than the memory of Einstein, Julius Caesar, Montgomery or Picasso. Into the mists of time our souls may depart, and no one in this life can say for sure where to. But in some form we last forever.