The end of the big sky

Sometimes when you look up at the sky, it’s too vast, too magnificent to comprehend.
Its swirling cloud formations and the refractions of the sun’s dying rays of light appear as entire galaxies, racing to the solar system’s end. Each night is like the end of time.
That’s how it felt the night I heard about Nandez’s passing. I hadn’t spoken to that man in eighteen years, but his words are burned onto me. I felt a strange crumbling void, somewhere in this world, to learn of his passing. I’d have gladly sacrificed the morning to know he was still around.
I stayed out, long after the early dark, that night. I just stood there, stock still, as the last creepers of light pulled their tangled arms down into the impregnable undergrowth. Gnats and midges bit hard, but I held firm, entranced by the darkness. I wanted to see if Nandez would come.
In my mind’s eye, I could see Hernandez: blue jeans and long hair. A strange stereotype of an older, mysterious man. He was good to me, but he told me strange things, horrible things. He said he knew when he was going to die, and he said that I’d know it too, when the time came.
For years, I thought that he was going to appear to me at the hour of his death; one last meeting between us two. It really scared me for a while. It’s scary to think I believed he could actually do it.
After a while I realised he wasn’t coming, and I felt something between relief and pain. It turned out that I did find out he was going to die, but that was because his friend called me to tell me a few hours before it happened. “He fell under a train,” said Simon. “He hasn’t got long.”
I’m not sure what Simon wanted from me. A message? An apology? After a long while, I just whispered, “Goodbye,” and put the phone down.
I was thinking about this, as I stood out in the field, in the fantastic enveloping darkness. Had I been wrong? Should I feel regretful?
As my eyes got used to the pitch blackness, I saw the slow wink of a hundred points of light poking through the veil, and soon the sky had returned. It was just different now.
And as the evening clouds moved on and the star fields blinked into glowing life, once more, I turned my back on the sky. As I walked slowly to the house, I decided that I’d done the right thing. I looked at my hands in the moonlight and they seemed good, they seemed right. I wasn’t regretful at all.

Field skeletons

If a man stands in a field for long enough, he might become one of its skeletons.
As his shadow grows long in the afternoon, he may find that his feet have fixed to the tilled earth below him and that fate has made him part of that idyll forever.
That is a dream to have anyway, this dream to become a part of the field. Perhaps when I die someone will find my bones and scatter them there, bury them among the compacted clods and roots, plant them kindly.
A field holds many skeletons and not all of them below its green-brown canvas. From the dead sheathes of yesterday’s harvest to the slender sapling that yearns to grow so thickly and quickly towards the sun, all are skeletal beings. Spectral before you, transitory, without flesh, promising either life or death... but who knows which side will win through?
The very nature of the field is a slowly convolving routine; the ageless schema of death to life to death and life again. Nature is a wonderful thing of permanent resurrection.
But where does man fit into the field? Is man like this long dead machine, left to rust on the sidelines? Set there for eternity to watch its successor, the better machine, doing its role, doing everything better, while the new grass grows fresh and long all around it? What torment, it must feel.
No, I think man has a place closer to the field. It’s almost kin, to me, that aching pasture, that threshed turf, and we sit somewhere between that rusting carcass and the steady green grass. Though it’s hard to say just where.
I hope I’ll find out, some day, when the sun casts its long fingers across the shadow of my life and leaves me standing there, naked before the winter, still and skeletal in the midst of the great field.