On Time and Darkness

When did it get to be May? Times goes by so quickly sometimes that it makes me dizzy to think about it. Sarah will be eighteen in two months, and it seems like only a year or two ago that I was mad that no one called me at camp to tell me she’d been born. I was sixteen then. Was I ever really sixteen?

I’ve lived in New Orleans for nine months. Nine months. It’s so much time yet not much time at all. Sometimes I think I have nothing to show for my almost 34 years on this planet, and other times I think I’ve done so much.

I watched "What’s Eating Gilbert Grape" tonight, and the scene where Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis watch the sunset and then walk along a deserted dirt road in the utter dark with fields spreading to either side made me a little nostalgic for home. I miss watching the Sun set over the fields, watching Darkness envelope me slowly and lovingly, watching the Stars peek out of the Darkness one by one until there are hundreds then thousands then millions of them winking at me. Darkness is not known in the city, not even here on the edge where the lake stretches to the horizon. The city’s inhabitants are afraid of Her, and even as a child I never understood why. Without Darkness there are no Stars to play hide-and-seek. I feel Them beyond the edge of the city lights. My eyes search in vain for Them, and I feel Them call to me, but They are hidden from me by the city’s fear. Even the Moon is sometimes difficult to see.

It makes me more than a little sad.