Dawn till Dusk

The man hung his feet over the escarpment, looking, for all the world, as one contented with life. The bird that wasn't a bird had watched him climb the slope earlier in the day, watched as he scrambled up the ridge line, and watched as he took his ultimate position looking down over the town below. Eventually, as the cold washed over the man and the bird returned to its perch the moon that was not a moon noted the naked human in the unusual location. The man noticed the bird and he noticed the moon, he noticed the scorpion, and the townsfolk, and the rocks, and the air, and the ground, and the time; he noticed them, and he felt them. The never burring sun had every expectation of bathing the man; however, as it burst over the mesa's edge there was no man, and, a moment later, there was no sun.

He awoke in the town with no memory of where he had eventually rested. In fact, he would not have qualified his hosts as a town had not the locals referred to themselves, quite cheerily, as the townspeople. Something about this seemed peculiar but to his chagrin he could not decide what. They asked him if he had a name, he told them he did, of course have a name, but when they pressed him it was he was unable to recall. He asked them if they had names, thinking that perhaps in the act of hearing a name, in the language that was so obviously his native tongue, he might jolt his memory into awareness. They laughed and said of course they had names, they were the townspeople. Eventually, this seemingly futile exercise lost interest and he stopped asking them and they stopped asking him. He walked with them to the spring at the base of the mesa every morning to gather water, delaying the start of the day by the will of the shadow of that great rock. Somedays, if the weather was clear and the group was not too hurried he would ask them to stop and look up at the ridge line as the sun peaked through. He wanted to visit the ridge, he wanted to sit upon that high granite throne and be the first to welcome new day into the world, but the townspeople would rally around him, saying that they feared that if he left them he would not come back and hadn't it just been very pleasant being in the town, yes for them, but also for him, hadn't he enjoyed all the food and lodging and hospitality they had provided him, and hadn't he better just stay in the town.

He wandered through the world, stepping from tundra to desert, from summer to winter, and from city to farm. There were no other people in this world, curious he thought, but not obviously wrong. Something was wrong, it wasn't the people who were missing; rather, it was something missing in him. That struck his as a problem to address latter. For now he needed to find the village, or was it a town. How had he come to this place, for it was a place. He wandered through the world but in doing so he barley moved. Often he felt as though he were falling, trees and buildings and mountains and oceans would rush past him all the while his feet would stay planted as his body gently swayed in the wind. The town was called serenity and he needed to find it yet he didn't have control of his wanderings. He needed to find the town because he knew there was a plinth high on a mesa above the town from which he could see out over the world. Perhaps there would be a trail of dust, or snow, or footprints. Perhaps he could see the road upon which he had wandered and which had, in turn, made him its instrument. Perhaps in that ultimate observance of self he could free himself of the terrible duty.

Bursts of speed intermingled with interminable sluggisgness. The blank, neither light nor dark, void upon which was now his sole domain, filled itself with memories from a life lived. Abstractions, for which he was the truest conception of godhead realized, surged past and through him. Imagery from his earliest memories was interspersed with sounds of angry children in their tumultuous years smells of a city made home and the touch of his spouse's embrace. A decade of love and stability, a decade of pain and uncertainty, and a year of healing, a lunch expanded to a dinner. He felt every sensation and emotion he had every remembered. His world within a world convulsed as he felt the heart attack followed by the fall, the fall which was still happening.

The man sat on the edge of the escarpment watching as the moon that was a memory of a moon set over the distant horizon. He watched as the first spoilers of day refracted of the remembered atmosphere and just as the sun prepared to usher in whatever new narrative that day would bring, the man pushed himself down off the mesa, allowing the fall that was a fall to come to an end.