Call to a World

(February 2010)

Call to a World

          The opening tides of night beckoned my eyes to stare at the steady procession of the moon into its everlasting limits. I began to liken the lofty sphere to the mountains of ancient times. An icy white embodied its belly as snow bestowed upon forgotten summits which never bore the bare skin of stone, and I felt a cool longing to visit the lands of rock and soil that braced the heavens. While I had never stepped foot upon such lands, I had often come to them in my dreams.

          But I instead found myself wandering the shores between desert and ocean, and I pried my eyes from their stare and transferred them to a lone bird that soared across the leaden atmosphere.

          It was not long before the bird became lost within the clouds and darkness, and a prickling on my skin along with the smell of new dampness, alerted by thundering in the air, warned me of the rains that were about to come. I took a last look at the moonlit waters that lapped solemnly against craggy shorelines and took one last listen to their tumbling breaks before I turned to submit myself not to the white sands of the beach but to the harsh sands of the desert.

          Along my way toward my goal, I spotted in the glint of the quickening storm a crab burrowed beneath a rock and another scuttling to a shelter unknown, carrying along its back the dying remains of seaweed. I wondered where it was going. Perhaps it was going to hide itself below a rock like its cousin had done. Perhaps it was headed toward the watery abyss it called home. I did not know, and soon the crab passed out of sight, disappearing as a cloud stepped in front of the moon.

          Aside from the intermittent glistening of lightning, the rest of my journey was uneventful, and my mind drifted to other times.

          A man reached his hand out to me, begging that I come. In his house hung a still picture of a scene I had never yet marveled, and before I had the chance to ask what it was, a voice from behind me said, It is called a mountain.

          That was the first night I dreamt of them, and whenever I dreamed of their glorious peaks, she would enter my dreams, and I would always recall the soft touch of her voice when she had announced to me what they were.

          It was not long ago that drops of rainwater wet my mouth and lips. Their taste did well to quench my thirst. Before long my clothes, too, had more than their share of water, and sodden, they began to pry from me the warmth left in my heart, and I surrendered my body to the pull of the storm, becoming supplicant to its will and finally to sleep.

          I arose in a green pasture sketched with a variety of white flowers and dandelions. Although a summer’s sun stretched overhead, a brisk coolness bestowed itself across the lands, and a welcomed quickening enveloped my blood as a sense of excitement danced about my character.

          His daughter was there as well. She smiled and spoke softly. I took note of her words, and I explained that it had been quite some time since I had last been among these towering lands.

          She smiled and took me to a creek nearby. I watched as she cupped the palms of her hands to capture and drink the woodland stream. The water was distinctly clear, such that I could easily count the faint lines woven upon her hands. The rustle of the waters brought to mind the nature of the wilderness creek and how it flowed to dampen the void created by a slope unending.

          I asked her where the river went, but she did not understand and simply said, The water is wherever it decides to be.

          Satisfied, I turned to the throbbing beat of hidden frogs, listening to each not as his own but as a member of an orchestra’s chorus. Their steady rhythm enraptured my senses, and I felt myself slip into a dreamlike hypnosis.

          Burp thum thum. RRRT! RRRT! Burp thum. Burp thum thum. Burp thum thum. . . . And as night closed in, I began to feel fine grains of sand beneath my feet. And as the racketing chorus faded away into the depths of my mind, I found myself diverging from the last of the ocean’s beach to the unspeakable grains of a desert visited by none.

          The first day of the desert’s whim took its toll on me. The sun somehow seemed slippery in the skies, for whenever I looked up it was always in another spot, yet the sun always burned mightily in its preferred heights.

          By the time the flame delved into the eastern horizon, scabs and dry calluses made their way onto my body. I dug a pit in the sand, and with much difficulty I succumbed to a sleep I wished to be eternal.

          Look at the bird! Up there. In the air. I looked. Is it not beautiful? Yes, I agreed. It was.

          I watched the swallow catch the wind to glide toward its prey. Snap! That was the last of its morsel, and the bird made way to new havens left unfolded. Yes, it is, I repeated, and I shifted my attention to better examine the face of the woman beside me.

          A cool elegance stemmed from the grayish hue of her eyes, and a fiery orange tinted the black of her hair. Her face had been left untouched by scars of any nature and kind. I felt comforted by such a fact, and I longed to share the innocence felt by her eyes―to abandon the sorrow locked within my past.

          She turned in response to my agreement and gave me a smile that quelled the misgivings troubling my heart. What wonder had been bestowed upon her to be able to do such things? I waited for a moment as if expecting an answer. But none came except for the radiance that arose from her expression, and for that I was thankful.

          The grassy breeze interrupted my thought, placing my attention to a trail on the hill as it hurried up the side.

          And as we climbed the trail we passed by expansive meadows with giant boulders fixed upon their realms as still meteorites driven into craters amassed with pools of spongy water. A lake was there too. I recalled a crystal gleam to it when the sun pushed waves of brilliant light across its still surface. But its size I could not remember. Whether the lake was large or skinny, wide or small, I could not place it. All that was impressed upon my mind when I saw the sparkling waters was a vague notion of an ocean’s power, and with that I began to fancy a world of infinite water, one in which the sun would dive into the horizon in the evening and rise as a flame-cooled moon at night. And as those thoughts wound deeper into by being, I would begin to look at the woman at my side, and I would find myself between worlds of sublime beauty. And I would smile if only to suggest a calm peace within myself.

          A dry blast of sun-stung wind woke me from my rest, and a vista unlike the one of the night met my eyes. I lifted myself from my bed of sand, realizing the day was well advanced. I felt tired and weary. My muscles ached with an everlasting soreness that stretched my skin taught and course―a wilted flower. The horizon bowed forward, eternal, and I quested further into its deathly maw.

          Thoughts of former times made their way into my mind as a maddening heat bore its way down from the heavens into the hell below, and such notions slowly drew themselves into existence as mirages indistinguishable from the reality surrounding my senses.

          A cabin presented itself to me, and I opened the heavy door to enter its confines. Upon a bed lay a woman stricken with a death to come. If it were not for a sense of unfulfilled urgency hidden within her eyes and her husband at her side I would have mistaken her for an elderly woman lying out the remaining hours of her life.

          Do what you can for her. Please! he implored. The man swept back her hair to kiss his wife’s forehead, and a stray tear fell from his eyes to lie glistening in her hair before sinking into their tattered depths. He muttered a word into her ear before leaving the room in unspoken agony.

          An hour later he returned with his daughter when I told them it was time. They said their last words to her, and before long her breath failed to come.

          I left their home that night after they offered me supper, and I would come back to visit his daughter from time to time. But the loss of her mother had smothered her heart, and we would spend most of our time staring at the exotic land of beyond seated within the painting that hung on the wall.

          And that night, when the desert brought its ice-filled air, I had my final dream, and I dreamt of a world that had not yet come.