The Night

The night

I am driving down the highway.
It is night. There are few lights on the road.
The darkness swells. It envelops me.
Ancient, primordial night surrounds me. Timeless.

And here I am seeing it. My thought’s silence.
I become perception, before thought.
Promethean perception. Before words.
Just the dark sea of awareness surrounding me.
Just the dark sea of awareness that is me.

And I forget my name, and my position, and my rank.

Up ahead I see the lights of town.
I drive towards them.

Away from the deep darkness towards the lights.
And there is humanity surrounding me.
Placing its net upon reality,
Creating a dream upon this planet,
A dream that will last only briefly.

As I enter town, I become at once a little child, and a man.
I am my father driving me home through the city,
and I am myself, as a child, being driven.

The lights reflect through the car.
There is a strange comfort that I find in the sound of the car as it goes over the concrete bridges.
There is a strange comfort that I find in the headlights reflected upon my father’s eyes.

There is still a world.
Though the darkness has enveloped us, there is still a world.
And in this dark sea, there are so many happenings,
and if I were lost,
I could wash up on the shore of any of these small little dreams happening around me.