Reality Snaps Back: Midnight’s Blossom

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams… — Virginia Woolf

Stories reclaim Time that never was… There’s something familiar about discovery, as if an imagined world was always there, waiting for ink to bring it to light. Urgency possesses a writer’s hand, directing courses of thought, whether it’s through a pen or swatting at flies…that restless hand holds destinies. Nothing in the world adds a second to eternity, but ‘creating’ is the fickle verb that conjures more imaginative spaces, finds beaches in a grain of sand and star systems in city lights. A writer shuts out the world in order to see it, even if that sight alters reality, turning clouds to mountains and imparting trees with tongues. Everything has a tale to tell… Some stories articulate a moment, effortlessly, like a spider walking her own web, while others fall into pasts that should have been, worlds apart from our own. But spiders stretch space through the finest of silks, entangling flies and moths, stardust and leaves, before a gust of wind blows it all into ruin. Reality snaps back…

There’s a gap in between There’s a gap where we meet Where I end and you begin… — Radiohead: Where I End and You Begin

Squirrels are the oak’s offspring… Worms remind us that dirt holds far more than the dead, while they wriggle in darkness, through a realm in constant need of turning, since air and water already flow. Thoughts don’t think themselves, no matter how random they might seem, just as raindrops are no less remarkable than the storm that sheds them. Squirrels bury acorns so oaks can become… There’s a sense of longing in things that grow, from mushrooms to mountains, a writer and the stories she tells, in a never-ending entanglement of beginnings and ends. Growth is the lone dolphin in search of her pod, facing oceans alone, only to find she’s become someone else when she reaches those she lost. It’s the blue whale who finds smallness in the crushing deep, in places where size ceases to matter. A thought surfaces and takes a deep breath…

Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing… — Virginia Woolf

Leaves impart sunlight with life… Dusk settles colors into gray, before falling back to sleep, just as Night rises, darkly. Day’s departure pulls nocturnal creatures into starlight, just as larks shut their eyes while the owl glares on. Sounds gather texture at Midnight, adding profundity to gentle breezes and grim-alarm at the slightest footfall. A candle is lit and magic blooms… Through the flame, darkness dances around its glow, as eager to smother it, as hold it close for all Time. Even Night recedes from the glimmer, as surely as it rushes back in when the candle goes out. If only for a moment, a little flame pulled apart the dark for a few inspired breaths. Purple smoke thins as it rises, before falling back into latency. Reality snaps back, but different than before…

Hayden Moore