Friday, June 6, 2008

Shadows

In shadows he stood, his own shadow before him was a harsh, black, cutout. He was in a valley somewhere, with the moon looming large, and emanating a strange, white light. The kind of light that is like a flash; light that transitions the soul from one state of consciousness to another. The light was a catalyst to the foreign. In the light, his shadow seemed to him, a silhouette of his errors. It terrified him to see this flat echo of himself - the thin slip of his being that was so weightless. His terror was like the light - point blank without crescendo or decrescendo. Fear was nakedly present within him, like an alert startle. The light had trapped him in suspended terror, and it seemed that he was fated to stand there at the mercy of light and shadow.

His shadow wavered gently, as if struggling to awaken from its stupor and metamorphose to some new physicality. He gazed up at the moon - the perpetrator of his angst. It was not beautiful. It was only a colossal electric orb that hummed and flickered, and his shadow was like a dumb moth, bewitched by its luminosity. He began to hum the tuneless rhythm of panic even though he realized that it was his distorted imagination that was fabricating such fear. Even as he quickened his pace, he knew that on another night, he would be just as likely to find the ghostly moon, and its conspiratorial shadows things of poetic intrigue.