Way up there, a tiny plane skates across the early spring blue. Here, the bus wheezes up to a stop sign, waits its turn, then groans on. The sun has hours yet to make its languid descent into rooftops and half-clothed branches.
Scuffs streak the plexiglass. The eyes are trained to peer right through.
What would it be like to see only this in here? Only what’s behind? I still have hopes of Corsica. Each year another scar cuts across the frame. The edges blur. It’s clear enough, though, for today: Maybe almond trees, maybe the Pillars of Hercules. Or Galapagos. The Badlands at the very least.
It was just now, or near enough to now, that I pressed through a scouring wind to summit Mt. Snowdon in Wales and cooled my blistered feet in Llyn Ffynnon-y-gwas. Such a thing could happen again. Those engines up there could carry me to the source of the next pool where my toes touch bottom as fish nibble down to live skin.
Another renewal.
It’s not impossible.
Or if I choose to walk lightly, I could use my own traction. Starting on this very bus, I could cast off on a winding route to the borderlands where the last of the wildcats hush their flanks against night.
The sky is a door. I am 41 and just came from the gym where I pulled 70 pounds and crunched 100 times on an incline bench.
Now my pooch who narrowly missed her date with a Chinese abbatoir flies like a formula one race car across the dog park that backs against the freeway. She turns fast enough to send mulch and dirt blasting into the sound wall. I shed my jacket and hurl the ball, my arm getting looser now with each lengthening day.
Now I sit in solitude at a dim table at the Indian restaurant. I taste it all: the whang of the cilantro leaf, the spring of my jaw against cubes of cheese, the smoke that lingers in papered boils on the flatbread. Tabla music patters against the sizzle and clank of the kitchen.
Now I bend to this page and rub the dull lamp until it glows.
Everything here is here. Everything here is forward.
What luxury, this illusion.
How fleeting.
The texts ping in, one, then six or seven more. All day in bursts, each sounding a claxon. She is in the ER. She is prepping for surgery. She’s in the OR. She’s in recovery. Her hip is fractured. Her hip is mending.
If she makes it through the next three months, she’ll turn 95 in July.
What must it be to come up out of the fog of anesthesia into the even more stifling smog of dementia? To see only through scuffed glass, to see only the scars? No forward. Not even a here, really. The machines that didn’t exist in your lifetime then did, now they buzz across a silent blue you can’t see. Now they carry other people away into pockets of the world you’ll never know.
If you’ve even lost the comfort of memory, what then? Where do your eyes alight?
I am 41 and grip hard to delusion. This blank page is an open window. That sunlit frame holds no pane. I can step right through and cast my line up against gravity, snag that jet and let it ferry me into another fable, one waiting just for me.
I ignore the microscopic particles, the wind and all it carries, strafing the body of this vehicle. I pretend the light falls through unimpeded. Against the mounting evidence, I claim this day and this endless tomorrow.
Shannon E. Williams 
So vivid, raw, and emotional at once. Beautifully written.;)
I’m not sure “raw” is a sustainable state, but it’s how things are from time to time. Thanks for reading.
the experience between
perception & illusion
well expressed 🙂
Wow, thank you! I’m glad you find something in here that resonates. I’m on the bus right now as I type this, and you’re reminding me to look up.
This is just…stunning. You took my breath away. You are such an amazing painter of emotion, of feeling, of soaring. I am there on the bus and there coming out of the anesthesia and there at the side of a Welsh pond, and more than that, I am soaring somewhere in the blue you have mixed up out of some kind of magic palette.