and minding the food chain bit as well. But Ch.ase was dead certain that the birds didn’t give have a clue about yesterday anymore. And if they did, they certainly didn’t give a damn. For them, it was all about now and maybe a little bit about later. But Ch.ase felt that he was, like probably everyone else on the worldmonde.Planet, condemned to spending his days building bridges to traverse time. So, for all he knew, the new day today might well be one just like tomorrow could well also be. Or perhaps more like the day thereafter.
Yes, it could actually turn out to be a prelude to the future.time. But, at the same time, it might equally well be another day exactly like yesterday was. Or, it wouldn’t surprise him, like the day prior to that. Today or tomorrow might present everyone with yet another unexpected opportunity to relive the irredeemable promises of the past.time over and over again.
Or it might provide them with a convenient means to flee from it, providing them with a myriad of excuses to redefine their failings–or even better yet: those of others–if necessary.
This likely happened more often than most people were willing to admit or perhaps more often than some people even realized. In fact, it was something that was always going on around him.
His thoughts returned back to the birds.
Beneath the shelter provided by the dense canopies of these trees, Ch.ase was dead certain the mornings exuded such intensity that already the sheer premonition of a new day’s arrival can be felt here with all the senses. Here, in this place and in this instant, the air actually takes on an ethereal quality, caressing and brushing the skin with its still cool moisture, enveloping the body in osmotic folds of silken breathiness. A fragrance of lusty, flowery freshness rolls through everything in these few minutes during which day and night teeter precipitously in each other’s arms, pushing forward like a bow wave which momentarily revitalizes everything and everyone with its distinct scent, familiar yet indescribable, not unlike that of an imminent summer rain relieving the senses of their feel of deprivation, of the same yearning that might characterize a drought.
A drought that may have lasted anywhere from hours to years to an entire lifetime, all spent waiting for something like a warm, soft rain to fall.
But the unfolding of morning is as unhurried as it is inevitable. In fact, before one realizes what is happening, it will already have progressed beyond that fleeting instant where one eagerly sees, hears, tastes, and feels its coming. In this transitory moment, the crescendo of the birds will suddenly lend it a voice with which the essence of the following hours can be briefly distilled into song.
It is like a song that resonates as clearly as the vibration of a crystal, irrespective of what joy or sadness, pleasure or pain the day actually heralds.
With each new morning, this cycle repeats itself and thereby simultaneously also reasserts its innocence. Morning for morning in the transient radiance of the early hours of dawn, it seems that the measure of things governing nature, and in fact the earth itself, is reset while one’s own clock continues to resolutely tick away some jumbled semblance of hours and minutes, beats and counter-beats. And once we have understood and accepted this, it becomes impossible, inconceivable even, to attribute any of the responsibility for whatever subsequently happens to anything other than the mere existence of some deep underlying tangle of failings, and sometimes even outright evil, that lies concealed deep within the twists and turns of the human soul.
Not unlike the transgressions which will inevitably unfold somewhere today, with or without our own direct involvement, on this worldmonde.Planet.
This instant of the dawning, then, could be viewed as the equivalent of an immaculate white virgin sheet of paper upon which the day’s protocol will be indelibly etched, very often in sweat and sometimes in blood.
What irony, then, that this incorruptible record of the march of time then almost invariably disappears from our consciousness as new pages are being written, consigned into the rubbish bin of some collective amnesia. That little which ultimately survives in our scant understanding of humanity and human history is arguably nothing more than the dog-eared fragments of a grand narrative, sometimes treasured but almost always starved of its inner logic and substance by a simple non-malicious form of near-universal neglect.
So it is that the break of day often represents to us only an instant before our awareness and our perceptions wander to other things that seem to matter more than that very instant we actually begin directing our attention to them. But it is this one briefest of moments, more than any other, which fleetingly bridges the future.time and the past.time. For many people, this day may offer a chance to find fault or give blame. For others, the advent of a new day will present them with some excuse to relive the past.time.
And so, after lying inert on his bed in this fashion and pondering these things as well as his own place in the universal order of things for several more minutes, Ch.ase finally succeeded in brushing the covers aside. He crawled out of his bed with a sigh. Shuddering briefly as he stood up, his bare feet absorbed the unholy chill of a cool faux-wooden laminate floor that felt as though its boards were made not of varnished paperboard but of ice or even frozen slabs of meat instead. Without bothering to turn on the light as he went, Ch.ase began making his way toward the bedroom window. As he drew up a sun-bleached paper shade with his left hand, he cast a first cautious glance through the dull pane at the street immediately below his window. It was completely empty, as it usually was at this early hour.
And, of course, there was no canopy of green leaves to be seen outside.
In fact, there were no trees at all to be seen outside his window.
Instead, a closed row of modest brick buildings presented themselves to him on this morning, as monotonous as ever in their stubborn uniformity. Although this street was probably rather unremarkable by anyone’s standards in Libertyville@Esperantia, some of the houses of the neighborhood seemed to hover somewhere in a discernible stage of disrepair bordering on decay. As a whole, though, the ensemble he was viewing in the receding gloom at this moment formed a somber hem that was sewn to the torn and faded fabric of a street as gray and listless as an early northern sky in winter. The windows of the houses opposite to his appeared vacant to him as the city slept.
They were not unlike the cavities of unseeing eyes, matte and dusty black.
The drawn shades of his neighbors, almost all of whom continued to be outright strangers to Ch.ase, tellingly underscored the kind of all-encompassing fluid apathy that often permeated the atmosphere of many so-called middle class neighborhoods, here and elsewhere. If one looked closely, everything here seemed to be covered with a fine layer of sand and dust.
But, what was most disturbing for him personally at this particular moment, was that there was not a single bird to be seen anywhere out there.
Nothing. Not even a lowly pigeon was visible sitting anywhere in the semi-darkness. Nothing even remotely avian was perched anywhere upon one of the fences, rain gutters or rooftops in Ch.ase’s field of view as he peered through the glass.
Yet the birds were indisputably back.
He had just heard them.
As a matter of fact, lately he could hear them nearly every morning. Sometimes their sound was a melodious singing, as it was this morning.
At other times, though, it could be a disquieting cacophony.
In the quiet solitude of such mornings, Ch.ase often fretted about the fact that he thought that he could actually consciously feel himself aging physically. He had been living in this place since he was somewhere around twenty-five, maybe even thirty years of age. He wasn’t exactly sure, though, when exactly this was anymore. This was one of the things that unsettled him most whenever he would pause to think about it. The linear notion of time in reference to biological age in humans had been largely erased by an unprecedented spurt of scientific progress. And, like it or not, he found himself caught up in the swirl of it just like everyone else around him.
And, of course, the fact that he was living alone didn’t make things any easier for him. If nothing else, it meant that something as relatively simple as counting the time spent together with someone in a bond of companionship