During my third decade, I often took a bus across the plains of middle America. Gliding through the deep silence of a rural night, the fields spread out like an ocean, the horizon a tenuous line between the dark of the land and the different dark of the sky. Farm houses with their constellations of porch lights and out buildings chugged past full of sleeping cargo. Fellow travelers dotted the trade lines of I-80. Strange sights emerged. I once woke to find an array of red orbs, dozens and dozens of them, hovering high above the corn, blinking on and off in unison. A flotilla in perfect formation. A UFO spread over Illinois. I stared at it, watching it slide past and wondering what rare secret, what odd nebula, had appeared to me in that liminal dark. Only travelling the same road in daylight, months later, did I realize it was a wind farm, the blinking lights warning crop dusters and airplanes away from the turbines. It became a landmark on my nighttime journeys, a point of amazement that, no matter how long I stared, I couldn’t make out the long shin bones of the propellers turning on their stalks. The night folded over them, left only the red bulbs blinking on and off.
Through those long, dark hours of sojourn, I slept, or tried to. Scraps of conversation hovered in the doorway of my dreams. A woman three seats up told her sister about the husband she was leaving—for good this time, for good. A man across the aisle muttered about his brother who was lost—Lewis, Lewis, man, where’d you go. The bus driver traded jokes and route changes, how to avoid the construction on 65, over the radio. My own scraps of hymn and prayer, 90s TV scripts, surfaced piecemeal from my depths—Hail Mary, fully of grace, what’d Jerry do this time?—laugh track.
Staying awake felt like trading one dream for another, the spliced reels of my subconscious for something even deeper, something velvety and soft that crept from the stretching black fields. It came to blot out the worries of daylight. The emails, the nutrition facts, the billboards selling me back to myself, all inked into nothing. I felt in those nights what I couldn’t yet say: a knowing we’ve lost returns to the world as it sleeps, creeping quietly from the hedges and spilling across the furrows. Our bodies feel it as the mind recedes. Quiet now. There’s an infinity contained in a narrow bed. It stands waiting to remind us to lay ourselves down at the end of the day, to let the night fold over us like an unexpected blessing, to know we might be made for sunlight, but we were also made for the dark.
“There’s an infinity contained in a narrow bed” really struck me. Beautiful writing.
those partially-asleep partially-awake strangely lucid dream bardo states of mind are so interesting ✨️