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January 1, 2012

January Firsts

I spent a few minutes perusing old annular writings and found this entry that I actually like quite a bit. I was telling someone recently that I almost I trust my writing enough to try my hand at writing fiction; this bolsters my confidence.

January 1, 2009

I didn't want to leave. The path from Texas to the Windy City is straight line; so why when I travel there do I always wind up in Atlanta? Some ancient ley line pulling me East when I need to go North; making straight a curve, as natural as an arm bent at the elbow. I trace its length with my fingertip; finding the radial artery that runs the entire course, following it to the elbow where I pause, and then turn on towards the wrist. Along the way that vein opens of its own accord; the sun is low in the sky and spins gold out of the pools and rivulets that well up from its riven surface; a spatter of mercury stretching to the horizon. Little lakes and ponds shimmering like mirages that do indeed disappear as the sun sinks lower and the faded green and brown quilt below turns monochrome with frost. Winter spreading in the afternoon. I flatten the image in my head, as I imagine Vermeer must have done, so as to see it as patchwork of color and shade; to detect the blues and purples in what looks so uniformly gray.

We hit a bank of clouds, and all color vanishes. Something deep and guttural shifts within the plane as it beginning to drop. Nearly there, after six hours. The radial artery wraps around the wrist. Its shoots spread into the fingers. It is almost as far from the heart as I can get. To get to where I really want to be, I'd have to retrace my steps, take the same path further back, back to the brachial artery, where I'd slip through a a wall of muscle below the shoulder and try to make longitudes out of the axillary artery, which itself would give way to the subclavian artery. I'd stay its course and then duck under the arch of the aorta and slip down through its descending branches, into those depths below, where East and West and up and down no longer matter and everything is a deep shade of red. Finally I'd find myself in the coronaries, and I could curl up warm and rest.

Vapor on the window; a thick imposing rolling wall of gray, thousands of feet high, reaching from the ground to somewhere above us. I settle back, and it's then that I see in my periphery: a ribbon of pink, unfurling across the sky in less than half a second and then vanishing. An optical trick, I think, but then there it is again. Brilliant, shimmering, heraldic, rippling long across the distance. Seemingly free from physics and all the natural laws, like the sailor's green flash, and like that gone in an instant. It makes no sense. I see it a third time. It's something to hold onto. And so I do. I hold on tight and let it be what I need it to be.

The cloud bank dissipates. The patchwork below is deep dark blue, and off in the distance is that same splash of pink, but sustained. A valiant sunset, making itself known while it sinks into the West. Hanging over the source. Waiting for me to see it. I know. We land.

Posted by David Lowery at January 1, 2012 2:50 AM