Night

It’s around 2am and I can’t sleep. Could be any number of reasons. Friends are going through hard times and I’m never sure how to reach out or even if I should. The arm hurts, and the leg. I had too many covers on, and my internal thermostat is always set to High when I sleep, so even on a cool night like this I can wake up clammy. I haven’t written anything in weeks that wasn’t for uni, and that usually means there’s a bottleneck inside of me somewhere.

I do a lot of stuff, but is it the right stuff? I’m studying, but it’s often a fucking slog because it feels like painting-by-numbers. I take regular breaks and do other things – bake, practice music, make stuff, read. Yesterday I baked bread, relearned the basic blues scale on guitar, spent time just being there for a friend, hit hot metal with a hammer for ten minutes until my hand gave in. Hassled my kid about getting an important thing done. Chatted with a neighbour.

I haven’t touched another person for a while. Maybe that’s it. Ok, that’s definitely part of it. We’re social animals and as much as I don’t want to get within ten feet of most people at the best of times, I could do with some of that connection every now and then.

But it’s 2.30am and I can’t sleep, and I’m alone and can set my own hours and won’t disturb anyone, so I get up. I make a coffee, walk out into the back yard, and look up. There’s a meteor shower tonight, in the northeastern sky, but I don’t see much. That’s ok. I’ve seen rocks fall from the heavens before and while it’s always a thrill there’s other things here to thrill me as much or more: I can see the stars.

The air is cold and crisp, and clean. I remember moving to the city, and how it stank. Relentless pungency a legacy of the Promethean theft that lies at the heart of our success as a species. As a maker of things and appreciator of science, I ruefully acknowledge the irony that the stench I deplore is wholly related to how I came to be, and how I draw meaning from the world. I wield fire when I shape metal, the same fire that burns to make the glass used to craft the lenses through which we examine the very small and the very large. The fire renders the world subject to our understanding, but the fire also pollutes.

I grew up a country kid and moved to the city at seventeen. Over the years I became desensitised to the fact that you can’t see shit in the night sky there. There’s no boundless infinity to be aware of – the endless glow shed by humanity’s recklessness casts a pall over the whole endeavour, the lid of a fucking coffin cutting us off from the cosmos. I wonder if the inability to look out is reflected by a curtailment of our ability to look in, whether everything is kept to a narrow band of experience because we just cannot see past our own surfaces. Or something.

I don’t know, and I cannot speak for others. It’s 3 am and the coffee hasn’t really kicked in and I’m not the best at articulating this shit anyway, for all my pretensions. But it strikes me that right here and now I’m incredibly fortunate, a tiny emergent phenomenon occurring on the thin crust of a spinning ball of rock, and from where I stand I can see the stars.

This is why I left the city.

Here I can see the stars.