Coincidences
Every thing is a matter of contrasts. Life versus death, dark versus light. The universe is made of them. The world can be a loud and terrible place when cast upon it is the unforgiving brilliance of daylight. People shout and run and push the less fortunate out of their way, all while they travel across this tiny rock under the harsh and hot sun. They feel a sense of security during the day they dare not feel at night, no, not while the moon casts her shadows and the world bathes in darkness. For others, these roles are reversed, as they flinch and whimper and squirm as the sun bears down on them, as though the light was shining on them and them alone, as though the light burns through to their souls. But at night, as the red hot bitch sinks over the horizon and her pale sister rises in the east to greet the freaks and vagrants, they slink out from their holes like vampires exiting their crypts and they breathe a sigh of relief as they dance off into the shadows.
Such contrasts stand as a universal truth, as monoliths of reason that exist to mock the tempest of foolishness and insanity swirling around them, trying their damnedest to corrode them into dust.
—-
It was three fifteen in the morning and the man walked through the empty lot full of gravel and discarded beer bottles, he walked over the grassy hill and ran his hand along the chain link fence, allowing his fingertips to dance across the cold metal. The wind pushed him forward, blowing his hair into his eyes, and it filled the air with a soft hum. He stepped off of the curb and walked the four paces it took him to reach the center of the highway. He looked north, then south, but saw no headlights, no taillights, no sign that anyone had passed in either direction. To him, it felt as though no one had passed here in years. He stood there, in the middle of the highway, one of the many circuits that connect city to city and provide people with a clean and safe path to see their loved ones or to find new ones. He reached down and dusted a section of the asphalt with his hand, right across the faded twin yellow lines that separated the road in half, and he gently sat down. He crossed his legs in front of him, he closed his eyes, and he waited.
—-
Time has such capacity to amaze. It crawls at a maddening pace when we are aware of it, yet it speeds past us in the blink of an eye. We are but specks in the stream, lost and alone and grasping for any bit of solidity we can find, hoping to slow the stream or indeed stop it if possible. All too often, we are pulled under, we lose sight of land, we lose our footing and the rushing waters engulf us, never to let go again.
—-
She was turning forty in only a few days and she wondered aloud what that meant. She wondered how she grew so old so fast, she remembered her childhood so clearly, and she wondered when time would stop for her. When the world would cease it’s rotation and when she would slip out of this world of physicality and into the next, more spiritual, plane of existence. Will it be tomorrow? she pondered, Or will I live to be a hundred years old, all wrinkles and wisdom? She drove on into the night and she looked down at the bright blue numbers that shone 3:16am from the shadows, but when she looked up from them, she screamed. She turned the wheel sharply to the left and as her car careened into a spiral of flying metal and terror, as the headlights fell upon the figure in the center of the highway, she had but a moment to think Is that a man? before the car landed with a crash, wrong-side up. The roof forced sparks of fire to leave the ground as it slid, however smoothly, across the blistered asphalt road. It came to a stop and the night fell silent.
—-
It is a widely held belief that there are no coincidences in this universe. It is simply too convenient an answer to all of the complexities of existence, both in this space and the space beyond, to say that it is all a series of coincidences that should be brushed aside and ignored as commonplace occurrences. The vastness of it all, the thought of multiplicity among universes. To cast such impertinence upon these things would be dire. No, things happen for a reason. Cause and effect, every thing linked to every other thing in a boggling maze of design as to reduce the most brilliant of human minds to madness, as human minds are still feeble things in the face of such circumstance.
—-
He opened his eyes. How long had they been closed? He smelled the smoke and felt the heat of the fire radiate against his skin. He stood and stretched his arms and walked to the flaming wreckage. He knelt down and peered into the window. He grimaced, then turned away. Not tonight. he thought as he walked back over the grassy hill. The moon hung low in the sky and glowed eerily against a sky with no stars. The screeching howl of ambulance sirens pierced the air and he was gone.
END
