IN PROGRESS

The mountain is a heavy breath hanging behind the smoke as we draw near.

This was the summer we went to the mountain.This was the summer when everything was on fire. This was the summer that the sickness shut everything up except the road to the mountain. The summer when the distance between every human being was further than ever before. The summer that we thought might never end. We drove and drove and drove, hundreds of miles to see if things were different. To see something else, anything else.

This is the mountain that is the youngest mountain in the mountain range. The most likely to succeed. The most likely to contain aliens. 

Every day we drove in a car up a road up the mountain. What else could we do, really? Eat freezer-burned ice cream sandwiches of the past? Worry about falling from cliffs? Fear wasps? Read a book out loud about Sasquatch and interdimensional travel? (We did all that, too.) There was a van of anarchists, up there, with a flag waving. (If flags are to be believed. If symbols are to be believed. If wind is to be believed.)

The road ended at a place for bunnies and boulders. We asked the mountain’s permission to lay on rocks. To soak the sun, to be above the smoke. To consecrate objects, to grieve, to look.

On the second day, I laid, basking on a boulder, lost in a repetitive conversation with a ghost of whomever or whenever, when I saw what I saw. A shimmering bruise on a sky skin surface. That is the only way I can describe it. A 2 dimensional portal. A thin membrane between here and there. It was dark and reflective. Changing color gently as an injury over time. Sliding slightly in space. But there, definitely there. But does it even matter if it was there or not if nothing was coming or going? 

Why did it appear to me? I, with no spaceship or destination? I, with human organs and thoughts and feelings and cells and choice? I, with the most modest expectation of safety? 

I, with the damage of years and violence and apathy.

*********

Go read a story about the distant past. In the story there is a character that will tell a tale from their distant past, and in that tale there will be another tale of the more distant past, and so on, until time stretches wide and empty and unruly. No rules. Too big to fail.

This is when there is water and the water is liquid and moving and the water is liquid and moving because of an event. 

Before that, there was a snowball. A planet sized snowball. The brightest white all the way around. The cold pulled every cloud out of the sky. This was a time of unveiling, and as every veil came down, everything died of exposure and embarrassment.  

The Earth didn’t care. The blink of an eye that didn’t exist yet. One or two shakes of a lamb’s tail, a lamb that will not exist for at least 650 million years. A snowball rolling on the same old road, the same old curved spacetime plane. The same gravity well. Throw a coin. Make a wish. Before that, there was a possibility of slush and a promise of some kind. A premonition of slowness and then shatter.

AND THIS HAPPENED TWICE.

How long and how long in between? What was not learned the first time that it had to happen again? Was it a punishment or a curse? This world is predisposed to runaway processes. If one is good then four is better and if four is better you might as well treat yourself to sixteen. Ice begets more ice and more reflection and more contemplation.

BUT HOW DID IT END? 

If you think the end is a point and not a memory, then you are fooling yourself. The warm things came back, as they often do if you have the time to wait and care. The volcanoes did it. Nobody is blaming them for just doing what volcanoes do. And exactly what they do is dependent on gas and liquids and solids and chance. They are the heroes in some stories. No really. Truly. They are the heroes of this story (at least). 

Certainly if you are feeling too chilly then you will like what happens next because what happened is that all the volcanoes opened their mouths all at once and exhaled the atmospheric conditions for a warming trend. 

Cast off your parka, friend! 

Springtime has come at last!