Volant Works

I sip black coffee between bites of dark chocolate. The steaming elixir transforms the wax into a creamy aroma that coats my senses. I’m at peace. The Violence and Carnage around me mean nothing. The assault on the senses remains superficial — my mind at ease. At ease until I reflect on it, study it, scorn it. My senses begin to rotate their radio dials and allow the irritating static of the Violence around me to penetrate.

It had always been static. Not the comforting pin and needle type, but the stabbing, piercing and screaming type. In my moment of peace, I think something I had once heard – “The Universe seems the way it does because we’re the ones measuring it.” Since that moment I stopped seeing the Universe with human senses and thought of everything as static energy. Shapes and heat and light and sounds – all different frequencies and densities and weights of static. Static.

If all life on earth dies and all the humans and animals and bugs stopped looking at the Universe, how would it exist? Would it be as plants experience it? Static-sensing excited molecules mixing faster and faster as they heat with energy. The Static mix of air slowing as Earth cools and light fades. A quick wave of Static as a leaf hits the ground. A Vibrant dense Static shock as roots meet one another  below the dirt in the packed Static.

Stars and suns and supernovas and black holes, pulsating with heartbeats of super dense Static, pulling with intense gravity while projecting nuclear radio waves of Static across vast plains of emptiness only to crash at the speed of light into any and every form of Static across the Universe.

My senses catch hold on their sought-out signals and the Static dissipates to the background as I can see and hear the scene around me. I’m tuned back into what looks like a war scene. I pack the chocolate away and sip the last of the coffee that has turned cold. Flames rise next to me. The smell of burning tires mixes with concrete dust and singes my nostrils. I guess that a bomb has exploded a few meters from me. Or a meteor, or natural gas line, or a nearby long neglected industrial boiler has erupted into chaos. The world erupted too fast to react.

Often as if I’ve missed my chance to react, I stay in my thoughts. It started slowly and now not even Carnage and shrapnel flying towards me can knock me out of it. The world has never delivered and followed through with its shocks and surprises. They jolt and recede. If a moment is lost, no need to get excited – it passed.

I give up on the coffee and toss it aside. I need a new place live.