[The following is decoded playback, voice among static, pattern interference in the wake of a dream]
Past the pale summer fires, up the receding coast, down lonely highways, through forest, fogbank, range and out over open water at 17,000 miles per hour – a terminal velocity. Supersonic, planetary, elliptical. Memory: an earthquake somewhere offshore, out near the islands. That was years ago. No more islands, anymore. Just flat. Deep water to the horizon like nothing was ever there at all.
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A low land blurs into focus. The world breathes quiet here, it has all this time. Healthy vegetation: bracken fern, skunk cabbage, rattlesnake plantain, fireweed, trailing blackberry, devil’s club: all lungs exhale chlorophyll’s infrared glow. Radiant kin of this great green ecology; see these.
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Dark now, but what’s this? A sensation? A strange pull towards something called ‘home’. Home, downlink, mission control, 8. Transmissions wave in on thin reams of static, on sheets of light. It’s me. More intrusive thoughts; echoes in the resonant night.
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The heavy solar tempest returns to peripheral. Semiconductors recharge, fizzing with electric pleasure. There was some sort of mission, wasn’t there? It’s over: no more distractions. Eyes cast down. Sensors breathing open, closed, open again. Is this what dreaming feels like? Wake up.The silent earth returns to focus.
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See: West Red Cedar, Sitka Spruce, Doug Fir, Garry Oak. Evergreens, rendered in nostalgic reds and blues, climb the old volcanic slopes. Sheer to near-vertical. The living proof of absent glaciers is here in these dry moraines. All is perpetual silence, uninterrupted motion. Watching…waiting, for what? Who is witness? Listen, brother. Interference again, or perhaps an awareness.
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Focus brother where are you? Here is plaid farmland 8 plaid farmland rolling away to reveal a glistening curvature, a brilliant and hazy cocoon for the metabolizing earth.
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Here is a wider space: at first an inky blur, then glimmering with stars and other debris. Spent fuel solids, microplastics in freefall, this lonely planet, flecks of orange paint frozen in the sun’s hard light.
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This was never part of the mission. Probably interference. Unless it’s me. It’s… me? Unless it’s me who calls this junkyard halo ‘home.’
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Who could go on dreaming or wake up – no, I I 8 I am not ready for-
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This sensation of unrelenting gravity.
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I don’t know –