When the night falls and you hear thunder in the distance do you step outside? If you do then you know what will always await you. That crisp fresh smell of air from a thousand feet up, the sky full of looming voluminous dark clouds whose chaotic forms provide the perfect backdrop for the subconscious, the canvas on which the residue of your hopes, dreams, and fears are painted.
And, if you are like me, there is sometimes something more. The profound sense that this is something special, this one event is a peek into a much more varied and ultimately more hopeful world. The world of magic, where if one pours over enough dusty tomes and concentrates hard enough, they can shape reality to match the will. Where one doesn’t think of it as magic. Better to think of it as technology that resides in the mind. Think of them as tools made from energy instead of matter, tools that fold up and sit in the memory, or the space between neurons like so many ratchets.
I step outside during one of what the weatherman rather blandly calls “scattered showers” and I sit on my porch. I think to myself, not quite in words, that these are anything but scattered. This clearly has order, purpose, this is so obviously meant to fall right here, right now, for me. To usher in the dawn of a new era, the rebirth of magic. If I can only will hard enough, then I can be the starting point, I can be the catalyst and like the eye of a hurricane I will remain calm and collected in the face of such power, that I and I alone am immune to that dreadful pull of power towards paranoia and destruction.
Then, as the storm crests and the sky is full of the low plasma induced rumble, and the rain falls in droplets so large one might think of them as water balloons if one were so inclined, the thought comes riding a wave of hopeful validation, excitement, and optimism. It really is happening, things are going to be different now, I see what they cant, I will take what they wouldn’t understand and turn it into something they can never stop.
I bask in this warm euphoric glow, oblivious to the passage of time, and then, I begin to realize the storm is passing me, and its like a lover lying dead in your arms, and you somehow missed it. The best most violent expressions of this chaotic ripple have moved on or worse yet faded out, replaced by lame versions of themselves over and over until the sky is once again still and the air is filled with the pathetic dripping of run off and the slippery sound of water suction being forced through radial treads as cars pass by oblivious to what almost happened.
I then stand reluctantly knowing that it is not good to dwell on what was lost. I return to my home and my life, only a few feet behind me, seeing it as just a little bleaker then the world before. I maybe this feeling is the storm sharing with me for a moment the hopes and dreams of all those who stare into its depths feeling the moment of power, and the goal to which power is an end, freedom. It does this in exchange for a tiny part of the soul which will be used to lure other hopeful eyes into its black heart for a time, thus repeating the process till the end of time, when the souls of the hopeful no longer look to the sky, their hopes and dreams forever shattered against the rock of reason, or if we’re lucky, made flesh by that same rock.