Contemporary Thoughts on Manic Melancholia

It was one of those cold days, you know the ones? A winter day where the whole sky was that milk-fog white, like someone had dragged a white sheet across the sky that blocked anything coming in and trapped everything trying to leave. I wonder if this pearl sky had some sort of greenhouse effect, like when the gasses get trapped in the atmosphere and can never leave, making the climate it came from worse-off. My head was like that.

Snow had fallen a couple days before but it was getting to that stage where the previous rain had made it all crystallized and hard to the touch with patches of green poking through. The roads were completely clear with the white hedges flanking me like bumper rails. One of those winter days. I don’t know if they have a name, but they definitely crop up from time to time.

I was driving to the beach. I didn’t know why, just that I wanted to go to the beach. I pulled into the gravel parking lot and drove all the way to the spots closest to the water, parking perpendicular to the way the land ran. The lot was situated on a cliff face overlooking the water. Off to the side, there was a set of wooden stairs leading down to the muddy beach, but the tide was in so there wouldn’t be any land to walk on even if I wanted to. The waves were high but not close; from the front of my car to the edge of the cliff was probably about three meters, but if I sat just right it looked like the waves and I were on the same vertical plane. I adjusted my chair so I could recline a bit and turned off the radio but kept the heat on. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, just that this was the place to do it. The beach, on one of these cold days.

It’s funny how beaches always have water and land, but sometimes only one is visible. Weird how the tide works like that, something to do with the moon I hear; the relationship between land and water always changing, inching forward and inching backward. Sometimes you show up on a sunny summer day and are greeted with vast swathes of sand to lounge on. Not today. Not on this kind of day. As far as I could tell, the water was up to the base of the cliff face and the land was completely hidden under the waves.

When I rolled in I decided to park on the far left of the parking lot, not all the way in the corner but just about, leaving an empty car space to the left of me. A white SUV was parked about six or seven car lengths to the right and was occupied by an older woman with peppered curly hair and glasses. I don’t know how old, I’m not too great with guessing ages, but definitely older. I didn’t take much notice of her. I wasn’t here for that. To be fair, I didn’t know what I was here for, but it was evident to me what I was not here for.

My eyes drifted to the water for a bit. The waves were moving regimentally all in the same direction. They looked cold. They ebbed and flowed in a meditative fashion, with white foam bouncing between the crests. I started to think about jumping in, being carried out to sea. Not like, in a sad way. Just in a practical, mechanistic way. For curiosity's sake, what would happen if I took off all my clothes and just dived in? How long would I last? Where would I be taken? I wonder what Miss White SUV’s reaction would be. I peered over, playing this scenario in my mind. What would she do if I were just to get out and begin shedding my winter layers, stripping my circadian clothes? At which point would her perception change from ‘This guy is nuts’ to ‘Holy hell, someone stop him!’? Maybe when my sweater came off? Or perhaps when my jeans started to lower. I left my mind, and to my surprise, she and the car were gone. I don’t know how long I’d been there, but I guess long enough for her to get her beach quota fulfilled.

I looked forward again and rolled a couple more thoughts around in my head, none collecting any steam. Like a child trying to make a snowman with three snowballs on grass. I fiddled with the seat a bit more and toyed with the dashboard. I was just learning that I could change the brightness of the speedometer when a girl driving a low-black civic rolled in. She parked it about the same location as her SUV predecessor and turned off the engine. My mind suddenly evaporated and solidified in the passenger seat of her civic. I was there with her, staring off into the distance. The frigid waves crashing seemed to slow and sway, a faint warm glow filled the space immediately around me. I wondered why she had driven me here. What were we doing beforehand that prompted us to drive here? I wonder if we live together. Perhaps this is where we met, many summers ago...

With a smack of the passenger door closing, my mind was jarringly returned to my corporeal body, six or seven car lengths away. She was still sitting in the driver’s seat fiddling with something in her purse but a man about my age had gotten out and was opening the rear door. He reached in and extracted a toddler, about two or three from the backseat, all bundled up in pastel chromatic winter wear. From his yarn hat to his mitts to his jacket, the little boy resembled a tie-dye marshmallow. The man held the boy’s hand as they walked around the front of the car and joined up with the mother as she exited the driver seat. ‘Hmmm, I wonder if they met here many summers ago.’ I said aloud. I don’t know why I spoke. It was maybe the first exterior thought I’d had since I left for the beach. The words reverberated around the car, stretching and condensing, until nestling themselves in my ears. With that, I think it’s time I go. I don’t know what I did, or if I even completed anything, but for a moment this was my beach to wade in; but not anymore. Its whole outlook was different. By the time I had started the engine and backed out of the space, they had each taken one of the boy’s hands and were swinging him a couple of inches off the ground. They were walking towards the stairs leading down to the shore. ‘The tide must have gone back out’ I thought. ‘That’s nice.’

I pulled up to the intersection leading away from the beach. One of those countryside intersections connecting countryside roads. I turned onto the one that had led me to the beach. I didn’t know my way back exactly, but as long as I ventured in the general direction I would appreciate any distraction encountered along the way. The houses on either side of the road became more frequent and larger, especially as countryside morphed into suburbia. I wasn’t driving particularly fast, nor particularly attentive. Attentive to the road anyway, I was very attentive to each and every household and the intricacies of them. I caught myself slowing down by any translucent window that offered a view of the inside. The exterior of a house is on full display, groomed and trimmed by the owners to offer the public an exhibit. ‘This is me and this is my approved front yard to show the world’. You could probably tell a lot about someone based on the colour of their house or how they dress their yard, yet it feels vastly more intimate and surreptitious to peer in and get a glimpse of the inside. Surely that says much more about the proprietor than any lawn decorations that could be seen by anyone. Maybe people are much too like houses, or just perhaps, maybe houses are much too like people.

That being said, there were some absolute stunners. Some of these houses looked just beautiful on the outside. The detrimental effects money can have on character is balanced by its relative beauty to architecture. As mortgage prices rose, so too did the extravagance of their facades. One struck me so violently with its refinement, I slowed down, nearly to a stop. I continued on, down this road that I didn’t think I’d ever been on before. Some of the exteriors of these houses were so intriguing I just wanted to meet who inhabited them. Or maybe I just wanted to see what the inside looked like. I wonder if it’d be weird to just knock on someone’s door to give them a compliment on their house. ‘Hey... I was just driving by and wanted to say I really enjoy your house.’

Well, the outside anyway. I’d bargain I could guess how the inside looked based on the outside, but who knows. Perhaps I’d be pleasantly surprised. I’d probably never do it, be able to knock on a stranger’s door, but curiosity could get the best of me one day. Not a mansion or anything, just a nice substantial home. Hell, people have skydiving and climbing mountains on their bucket lists, I think the least I could do is ring a doorbell someday.

* * *

Familiarity crept up on me. Without knowing it, I’d come back to where I’d been before. It was an old road that bordered a woods. Not quite a forest, but quintessentially a woods. I had been here about a month or two prior, walking through the woods. I remembered I had gotten sick of trees, the irony of their suffocating effect on me. I had jutted out onto this open road and found this old decrepit barn. It wasn’t a nice wooden one, but a metal one that had gone orange and brown. It looked like it hadn’t been used by humans for years. Some swallows occupied the underside of the roof while I noticed a couple of cats entering and exiting from rusted holes in the sheet metal. I wonder what would be more frightening. Entering this old barn or the front door of a stranger’s beautiful house?

From where I was driving, I couldn’t see the barn but it should be coming up any moment. To my complete mundane surprise, it was gone. I’m sure I drove past the small section of land I remember it being on and there was nothing there but empty dirt and snow. A terrible feeling of dull anguish washed over me. I wasn’t particularly sad that the barn had gone. I mean, why would I care? I’m sure the swallows and cats will land on their feet, but just the matter that it had happened without my knowing. This barn I had only seen once before, months ago; was taken down for some particular reason. I pulled up to the end of the street and stopped. Cars streaked by my vision as my mind focused on the stop sign in the periphery. I wonder what would happen if overnight, without anyone’s knowledge, all the stop signs in the world turned into squares. Would anyone notice? And if they did, would anyone care? Would there be a brigade to change them back to octagons? I mean, they each have sides, the number of sides is trivial to its purpose. It’s not like we’re dealing with a drastic change, like if they were turned into circles. Maybe some countries would enact a re-octogonalization task force to return all the stop signs back to their former shape. Maybe some countries wouldn’t, and would just embrace their new square stop signs. I guess you can tell a lot about a country based on the number of sides to their stop signs, or people for that matter.

I finally did turn onto the next street, passing the red octagon as I did. I had been on this street on the way to the beach. I remember it distinctly as there was this road that intersected it perpendicularly, heading up a very large hill. I don’t know what attracted me to this road or this hill, but I just felt a compulsion to check it out. Much like the beach, I guess. If I had to bet, I think I liked that it went up. It just went straight up. When I finally found an opening between passing cars, I turned onto the up-hill road and was greeted by a large triangular (three sides) yellow sign with thick black letters. ‘NO EXIT’.‘That’s okay.’ I thought. ‘This is heading up. I think I’d like to stay up.’