Blackout

🎶Boris - Flood IV🎶

Neighborhood experienced blackout for about a half hour. It was the most surreal experience to go outside. Distant voices in this liminal plot. How by the very existence in this blackened place is so otherworldly. In a blink, what was familiar and acquainted becomes foreign.

It is an afterlife. A different life. All felt so complete. The curtains have fallen, and the show is over. When you walk these paths, you know you have walked them before, but it could not feel any more further removed, so drifting the current of time. It reminds you of the past. Where you grew up. The memories you had created. The people you met. They are things that have already happened and you will not experience again. They are only memories. Beautifully dark memories. 

When you look up from this blackened neighborhood, submerged so far into darkness, there shines the crescent moon and stars. They were always there. They have seen everything. Though these sidewalks and houses and yards are now stripped of life and plunged into purgatorial peace, the sky—it does not experience time. It is imbued with infinite patience. The world shuts off. The present is made more present. The future ceases to exist. Yet, the world has shut off just for them, hasn't it?

A reminder, a certainty, a restating, that the world has stopped, for them. All has paused for the night sky to make their presences encompass and surround the blackened world which they cradle. That's why this is happening now. It is the night embracing us. A good omen. The absence of common and typical, everyday happenings which we have so lost stimulus to, and the outage which severed the strings of our mental puppets tied and bound to the Everydays. It was a divine or significant event.

And just when you begin to feel heavenly oblivion's eternal darkness cocoon you, on the lights go. Machines whir. Central air units come to life. Clicking and buzzing. Some cheers from the children. And the lights, the street lights, all the lights, zap back on and what seemed to be a glimpse into the beautiful oblivion is suddenly vanished. The abrupt return to the Everydays is unwelcome. It is jarring, and still you are attempting to find proper ground away from the darkness. Despite the darkness still being here, it is impure, dotted with artificial things, machines, diodes, men and their inescapable signatures. But for the experience, for however temporal it was, it was complete.

It was a true sight of life. Of ultimate reality. A goal. Not of the lack of Everydays, a discomfort, or an inconvenience, but of the presence of nothingness incarnate. How even in the oblivion you find heaven. And if you moved far enough, you can see everything.