So Late It Is Early

Trying to reset the old out of whack diurnal clock by brute force, seemed like a good idea two hours ago when I was nice and alert and able to read...

Now I'm watching the sky grow brighter and the temperature fall on my little weather station.

Morning like this, you step outside and can feel the cold of space against the skin, thin skein of the atmosphere is no protection... body heat just wicks up and out, into the long dark deepness between the stars.

Morning like this, it occurs to you that this moment now is, effectively, the moment you die, no rupture, no protection, just the all too brief present unfolding in its always accelerating way until it runs headlong into oblivion's grasp. Into the long dark deepness of the inanimate from which you sprang, to which you shall return.

A morning not so unlike this one, not so long ago, I sat in the window seat of a tiny turboprop, waiting to take off on the first leg of a transatlantic trip. Flying makes me nervous, the sheer number of moving parts involved in commercial air traffic overwhelms my ability to make sense of the system, forces me to take on faith the notion that one will safely be conveyed to the edge of space and back as one flies from here to there.

My imagination being what it is, I began it picture how things could go wrong. Imagined the blades of the prop outside my window coming apart violently. Imagined myself decapitated, my head surviving a few seconds as the urban legends say it will. If that were the last bit of the moment granted me, I thought, what will I wish I had done?

And I looked at the play of the raindrops being blown back across the plexiglass window by the propwash, their tiny convexities splitting dull gray morning light into subtle, leaden spectra. Watched them dance up, then down, as the engine throttled.

I thought, I would wish I could write that down.

And now I have.

It must suffice.