Everybody needs a safe place. A place of familiarity that one can return to again and again to bring peace and reassurance to the soul. Somewhere exclusive and close to the heart, where one can escape from the pressing onslaught of the outside world and into a personal universe. A place like this is particularly important for those who have a weak center of gravity. So it happens that I am someone who treasures his own more than anything else.
My safe place is in the sloping evergreen of the cloud-hidden mountains that border my hometown. You can get there by driving up the mountain highway until you reach the four-way intersection. Taking a right turn, you will find an inconspicuous shoulder on the side of the road with a rusted gate and a dirt trail. Walk a quarter mile or so along this forested path and you’ll come across this small indentation of grass that veers off towards a large patch of forestation. In the midst of the dense greenery, there are two elm trees that stand out from the others, with branches that shoot out to form a sort of arch. It looks unmistakably like a gate, you can’t miss it. If you go under the branches, through the bushes, and into the daylight, you will arrive upon a small clearing with a gentle slope that overlooks my small town, the forest below, and the sea beyond.
Looking out at the open view, with a sweeping backdrop of foliage and greenery at your rear, you get the impression that you are on an amphitheater stage out in the wilderness. There’s a sense of security here, a certain detachment of sorts, as if nobody else could get to you. I call it the Balcony, because I feel like I’m watching the world from up here.
I live in a small town off the coast of Maine. It’s a charming little place, the kind that has smooth roads lined with artisanal shops made of cobblestone. We’re a town of normal folks who live simple lives. On the weekends, you would sit at a cafe with a book or go out boating with friends or enjoy a glass of wine. We don’t have much of a crime rate, and the kids grow up sheltered and bored to death. I’ve been here all my life – I had no reason to ever leave. If the world outside of my hometown was wrought with disaster, disease, and famine, I would’ve never known.
I consider myself to be a normal, run-of-the-mill sort of guy. One you probably wouldn’t notice if you were scanning a room. I’ve always been the type to mind my own business. I stir no trouble as long as none is brought my way. If you gave me a smile, I would return it. If I had to pass a test, I would study for it. If I saw a dollar on the ground, I would pocket it. Life has always been quite straightforward to me. For that reason, I have always felt as if the events of life streamed by me like trout in a river. It was something that took place in front of me, and I watched it happen through neutral eyes.
I grew up in a pretty orthodox way. I demonstrated no particular talent in any field, save for a minor affinity towards the written word. Still, I would say that I had a pleasant childhood. I rose through the levels of the schooling system like I was riding an old elevator up to the top floor. In elementary school, I played kickball with my class. In middle school, I read comic books and played video games. In high school, I learned how to drive and started going out. It was then that I came across the Balcony. I was looking for a place to smoke weed with a few friends.
The spot quickly became my go-to spot. Proud to have a place I could call my own, I used to drive up there all the time. Once in a while, I would take a girl out there for a date. We would share a cigarette, have something of a deep conversation, and make out in the grass. Those moments felt quite exhilarating, as they emanated an adventurous, youthful kind of feeling. But when I look back on those days now, a loneliness creeps up on me. Those people were simply visitors. We talked but didn’t share. It was as if they were wisps of air. Like nothing at all.
Eventually, we all graduated, and my friends and flames alike all drifted away, going wherever the wind carried them. Goodbye, I’ll see you soon, they said. I guess it was natural for everybody to trickle out of this place. There were passions and profits to pursue out there. Admirable strives, of course. I had neither, so I stayed back, unsure of what my path forward in this life was. There was no magical wind that came to take me someplace where opportunity stood by. I didn’t know what else to do, so I waited and waited.
I spent a few dreary years at the local community college, where I stumbled through a meaningless degree in English. At the request of my folks, I worked part-time at a cafe near the outskirts of town by the mountain highway. Each day was as repetitive and boring as the next. Weeks and months blurred into each other like coffee and steamed milk. Still living with my parents, I had little to no social life. I passed the time by devouring books and listening to music at libraries and bookshops all around my little hometown.
After graduating, still having come across no magic wind to lift me up and carry me away, I transitioned into working full-time at the cafe. I had no faith in this path forward, as serving coffee to strangers all day had no zing to me, but I had no other choice, really. So I drifted onwards. During this period, the Balcony took on a whole different meaning for me. It became a place to escape, from myself almost. I went up to the clouds to get away from the weight that each passing month piled on top of my soul.
This past year, the weight had reached an unbearable level. It got to a point where it felt as if there was a force pressing down on me at all times, suppressing my momentum in every which way. There were times when I had to skip work because my body wouldn’t have the energy to get out of bed. In my eyes, the world had taken on a flatness, a lacking quality, as if all the color had been drained from it. Not even my favorite books could stir my interest anymore. It was like I had reached a dead-end. There was nowhere left for me to go. Everything had come to a stand-still.
I’ve never been the superstitious type. In fact, I have always prided myself on being a pretty level-headed person. But the way I see it – when you have nowhere left to go, there are only a few options for you to continue onwards. And like a pressure cooker that has been left on for too long, something needed to be let out in a drastic way. In the autumn of last year, that was exactly what happened to me.
I have already given up trying to reason out the events that took place and place them into a frame of understanding. I simply can’t. All that I can do is record the events and experiences as I remember them to be, and leave the rest up to you. I am recalling these memories in hopes to make sense of them in writing and share them with you, for whatever that’s worth. I’m sure that whatever meaning these events had was self-contained within the moment and thus impossible to access.
So here it goes. Let us return back to the autumn of last year…
The morning it all began, I was alone at the Balcony as usual, laying face up in its dense green tall-grass and gazing up at the sky. It was wonderfully quiet up there, save for the occasional car speeding by or a distant chirping of the birds. The air was chilled and slightly damp, giving it a mint freshness. A calm stillness enveloped me, like a cocoon. A mild breeze passed through, sending a sigh through the grass. Above me, soft clouds floated by, carried onwards by the wind.
I relished my mornings up there, where time stood still and I could stop thinking and worrying. Soon, my shift at the cafe will begin, and the world will start spinning again. I stop existing as an observer, watching the world leisurely from above the clouds, and become a participant in its depths, with my head under the water and arms flailing wildly to stay afloat.
I watched the clouds drift onwards and onwards, towards an undetermined destination. This particular patch of cloud had a unique shape, bent in an arrow-like form. Its body had a lack of density, seeming almost transparent, making it hard to tell where the cloud ended and the sky began. Even the clouds have their own qualities, I mused to myself. Why does a cloud need its own shape? You’re all clouds! You do the same thing. It doesn’t matter what you look like.
I had seen videos of self-proclaimed mystics on the internet bend clouds using the power of sheer concentration. I remember there was one past morning when I had decided to give it a go myself, though of course I didn’t truly believe it was possible. I laid face up, aiming my index finger at a single cloud, and focused all of my energy onto it. I strained and I strained until I felt my veins bulge against my temple, pushing all of my energy into my finger and visualizing myself erasing the cloud like a marker on a whiteboard. I must have been doing it for a good ten minutes or so, and I even got a little dizzy from the rush of blood to my head. In the midst of my focus, at a point when it felt like my eyes would pop out, I must have imagined for a split second there being less cloud than there was before. But when I finished, the cloud hung motionless in the air in the exact same shape and position as before, almost nonchalantly, as if mocking me for my foolishness.
The morning it all began, though, I remember that the clouds were actively making their way across the sky. There seemed to be a certain insistence in their motion that day, like they had a purpose or a destination in mind. I let out a little scoff at the thought of a cloud speeding down a highway in the sky, swearing at the traffic and bemoaning its bad luck. It seems so unnatural for a cloud to ever be in a rush. They simply let the wind carry them wherever it goes. Or does it? I wondered to myself. Does a cloud travel on its own accord or is it at the mercy of the currents? How do they know when it’s their stop to get off? What does it matter to you where your destination is?
Sighing, I picked myself up off the earth, brushing the grass off of my pants, and started my trod back to the car, clearing out the wandering thoughts in my head.
I did not mind working at the cafe. Sure, it was a little difficult at first to juggle learning all the recipes, taking care of the machinery, and serving the customers, but after a while you get used to it and it becomes like second nature. The rhythm of the tasks is quite therapeutic and doesn’t require me to think much. I found the work quite meaningless, but it sure was a relaxing way to dial out on autopilot and pass the time.
And so that day, I was spacing out, idly frothing up some milk, when an unfamiliar presence stepped into the cafe. The crisp morning light still hung in the air. An espresso machine groaned and churned about in the background. A lazy jazz soundtrack softly filled out the rest of the empty space. It was one of those calm midweek mornings when customers were sparse and faces were mostly recognizable. But this person I had never seen before. It was a girl, more or less my age from what I could tell. She had on a pair of stylish black headphones and wore an oversized black metal tee, a pair of baggy acid-wash denim, and a neon green backpack. In that attire, she stood out like a sore thumb.
I glanced at her again through the corner of my eye. Nothing about her belonged here. The girls around town wore pleated skirts and blouses. They wore light makeup and moved with a sort of New England exactness. This girl looked straight out of a grunge band out in Shoreditch. She gave off a vixen-type impression, the kind that was messy, dangerous, and unpredictable, as if at any moment she might spill out of her container. How did this girl find her way out here in Maine? I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it was so unreal. Yet, there she was, standing right there with a sullen, deadpan expression on her face. Without saying a single word, this girl had broken all the harmony in the place.
I watched her approach the counter, with a reticence to her step like a deer crossing the highway. One of my co-workers goes up to greet her, and I hear her order a drink. To my surprise, for such a delicate looking girl, she had a low-ish, husky kind of voice. More questions sprang up in my mind. What sort of accent was that? What does she do?
“Your name?” asked my co-worker.
The girl said her name. I remember hearing it, but for some reason, as I try to recall it now in my memory… I come up with a blank. I’ve racked my mind time and time again to bring it back. But it is irretrievably lost. My deepest apologies for omitting it.
After paying, the girl slowly drifted over to my side of the room. I kept my gaze down and my hands busy with the next order, but I was painfully aware of every movement she made. Everything seemed a little bit more subdued in her presence. The smooth jazz that usually played in the background felt a bit more washed out and vague. Even the espresso machine’s growl toned itself down to a polite hum.
I was able to get a better look at her through my peripheral. The girl’s face was pale and round, almost baby-like. She had thin lips, a flan chin, and a button-like nose. Her most striking features were a pair of mooning cat eyes, guarded with black eyeliner, as if hiding something important down in its depths. It wasn’t that she was overwhelmingly beautiful – her face possessed a certain imbalance that prevented her from being labeled as traditionally pretty – but she had something else. She simply projected a certain aura that I recognized as beauty. I felt attracted to her instantly.
“Hey.”
I froze, as if a spotlight was cast upon me and the eyes of a thousand observers followed. This whole time I was observing her, there was a degree of separation between me and her, and I hid behind that anonymity. I was not expecting that barrier to be breached so quickly and suddenly. Was I about to be swallowed whole by fate?
I looked up to find myself peering directly into two dark pools of unknowable substance. Immediately, I felt her essence to be of a foreign nature, something of a wandering feline, or a midnight scavenger, quiet and demure, yet impossibly mysterious and intoxicating.
“Do you mind showing me where the restroom is?”
As if there was a distance between her words and her meaning, my mind raced to process her question. I nod numbly and point her to it. Responding with nothing more than a soft smile, she silently glided away, leaving me more dazed and scattered than ever before.
I watched her through the glass window as she settled into a seat in the far corner of the outside patio. She wasn’t doing much at all, just staring out at the street and sipping her drink. Perhaps she was contemplating an important matter. Or perhaps she was observing something that I simply could not see. After a while, she finished the rest of her drink, stood up, and walked back out into the streets, gradually slipping out the horizons of my vision.
For the next month, this strange girl appeared at the cafe regularly, two or three times a week. Her presence brought a new sense of rhythm and drive to my day to day. I started anticipating her arrival in the mornings, wondering to myself if I would see her.
Our interactions never amounted to much. I was sure that she recognized me since I was the one who made her drinks every time, but we never exchanged more than basic pleasantries. I would cast her a polite smile and mutter some inelegant greeting, and she would smile and reply with something of a similar nature in her low rasp. Of course, I was dying to say more – I would sit down and spill out my soul to her if I could – but something about her made me clam up, unable to squeeze out any words beyond that.
And so our connection was an implicit one. In my spell-bound state, I could only silently watch her each time as she picked up my drink from the counter and made her way over to the usual patio corner where she sat and brooded. I was always filled with a helplessness, a sort of exasperation at my own inability to do anything about it. She seemed to be aware of this. I could somehow sense her knowing.
These moments stood out to me like the splashes of a skipped stone in an otherwise gentle stream of time. My routined life still stretched out before me. I would go up to my safe place in the mornings, work all day at the cafe, come home to make dinner, and clock out before it got too late. Each day served no purpose but to take me to the next. But this new presence told me that something was changing. My thoughts were a little bit more mixed up, a little less lethargic than before. I could sense movement in the air, although I couldn’t pinpoint what form it would take and where it would lead me. I could only wait.
Things continued on steadily until the very last week of the month, when something finally decided to reveal itself. It was a chilled, hazy kind of day, and the mountains were covered with mist and dew, so I decided to skip out on the Balcony. I had just checked into my shift and made myself a latte to warm up when I saw it.
A few blocks down the street from the cafe, a cream-white vintage coupe had just parked itself, light as a feather. It was a stylish box model with a refined sheen to its exterior. My eyes immediately locked onto it, recognizing the ride as something special. There seemed to be a unique quality to its shape, a sharpness to its silhouette. It possessed a nobility that I couldn’t quite put into words. You can tell when an object has a purpose, and this car seemed to bring something with it.
There seemed to be two figures sitting in the front seats of the coupe. At this distance, I couldn’t make out much except their outlines. They stayed sitting in the parked car for a little while, like a pair of surveillance agents. I imagined them to be discussing an important matter behind dark shades. Eventually, one of the figures stepped out of the passenger side of the vehicle and started heading down the street in my direction.
As it neared, I recognized the figure to be the girl. She wore black, wide-fit skate pants and a torn crop-top in dark purple. I had expected it to be her somehow, but it still struck me nonetheless. The scene before me just didn’t seem to match. A dark, gothic girl stepping out of such an elegant, refined-looking car. The two energies clashed, generating a tension that didn’t sit right with me. How has nobody else taken notice? I took a deep breath as she approached the cafe.
The wind gushed in as she opened the front door. Instantly, I felt the room pressurize, and a new sense of weight began to press on me. Something was different. My heart began to pound faster. Sure enough, as soon as she stepped through the doors, the girl broke from her usual routine and instead turned to look directly at me. Not at me – into me. It was a piercing stare, with a palpable force behind it. Her expression was blank and unchanging, but in her eyes I could sense her baring her teeth, like a hound preparing to leap onto its foe. The whites of her eyes seemed to glow, melting the quiet of the room into a silvery liquid.
Everything happened in a flash, if not in no time at all. Instantly, I felt like I had gotten submerged in molten silver. I couldn’t feel the cup I was holding. I couldn’t move at all. In that moment, I felt all the life force escaping from my body, as if a vacuum had opened up and was sucking the marrow out of my bones, leaving me a dry shell. I suddenly felt old, so old. Weary, too, as if I had spent the last fifty years of my life farming in the wheat fields of Siberia. In a perception that I could only call a sixth sense, I saw flowers wilt and glass shatter into nothingness. On the fringes of my vision crept in a white haze. Was I losing consciousness? Or was I losing something else inside of me?
Then, as quickly as it came, the vice grip loosened and my vision cleared. As if I had just awoken from a daydream, I rubbed my eyes and the world came back into focus. A customer was making an order. The jazz music was still purring. The espresso machine was still whirring. And the girl was gone.
A panic rose up inside me. There had to be a reason for what had just happened to me. I needed to do something. A thumping sensation arose in the back of my head, an urgent, pulsing rhythm that drowned out the rest of the room and pushed me to search my surroundings for a sign. I looked all around me. What had changed? What do I need to see? What do I need to do? In the corner of my eye, I picked up a cream-white movement.
It was the car. It had just pulled out from its spot and was making its way towards the mountain highway. I felt an energy and vigor flow through me, imbuing me with purpose and will. I calmly took off my apron, told my co-worker I was taking off, and briskly walked out of the cafe. My car, a beaten deep-green Toyota, was conveniently parked right outside. As I got in, I gazed up at the mountains, which were still covered by a sheet of morning mist. For a moment, I could feel it returning my gaze. Igniting the engine, I began the chase upwards.
It’s strange how something you’ve known your entire life can take on a completely different feel when framed in a new context. I’ve driven this mountain highway so many times that I know it like one of the lines on my palm. I’ve always loved how the road was covered in forest, dense enough so that sunlight could only shine through in small patches. I loved how the road would wind away gently so that one would feel a peaceful sway when driving along. I’ve always found the experience to be rhythmic and comforting, much like a rocking chair or a boat ride.
None of that was present this time around. For the first time in my life, I drove this road with a blinding urgency, like my life depended on it. The tail of a cream-white coupe weaved in and out of my vision, and I chased it like a fading light. I needed to follow this car, and I had no idea why. An unusual buzzing rose up from inside of me, and it took me a while before I realized what it was – it was desperation. This desperation transformed all the gentle twists and languid turns of my mountain highway into violent jolts and lightning strikes. I could feel its ferocity taking over my body and consuming my vision.
How fast was I going? I was veering off the lane lines at every turn. I gripped the steering wheel tighter. The highway was devoid of other cars, it was just the two of us. As we climbed upwards, the mist got denser and denser. The cream-white tail of the coupe started to blend in with the surroundings. Even with my headlights on, I could barely make out its shape. A sense of fear and unease began to creep in. I didn’t know if I could keep on going like this.
As if my thoughts were heard, the coupe suddenly began to slow down. By the time I caught up, it was already down to a crawl. At this point, the mist had taken on an almost opaque, billowing quality. I felt that if I opened my windows, it would come cascading into my car and swallow me whole. Realizing that I had lost track of time, I looked all around me, trying to identify what part of the mountain I was at. But the fog was too thick, and I could see no more than the outlines of shapes.
Where was I? Why was I here? Why was I following such strange folks? I had no idea if the pair inside the coupe was even aware that I had followed them. Could they see my car behind them through such thick fog? What were they even here to do? I rummaged my brain for any fact or thought that could bring sensibility to this situation.
Ahead of me, the coupe took a sharp left and settled on what looked like a small patch of open space off the side of the road. With a surprising quickness to their movements, the two figures stepped out into the mist and started in a direction away from me. They were so heavily veiled that I couldn’t even make out the color of their clothing. A few moments later, they had faded into the distance, and I could no longer see them. In a moment of solitude and indecision, I was frozen. I felt abandoned. Should I follow them or turn back?
I let my mind debate with itself, but deep down I knew that I had no choice. Slow and cautious, I rolled up my beaten Toyota next to the cream-white coupe and stepped out into the whiteness.
Have you ever passed through a cloud before? I can only think of two times I’ve done so in my life. The first was on a flight to California. Nothing special. The second time was on a trip I took as kid through the mountains near Thailand with my father. We were visiting one of the tallest peaks on that side of the globe, called Titan’s Peak. The place had dark and stormy atmosphere with black granite rising up to pierce through the sky. My father wanted to see the sunrise, so we had woken up early before dawn to climb up to a vista. We must have forgotten to offer up sacrificial gifts at the temple or something, because that morning we had found the entire mountain covered in dense, ominous-looking clouds. I remember hiking up the wet granite stairs and through the vapor, barely being able to see two feet in front of me. Everything was pitch black, so we had to wave around our flashlights like blind mice. It was nightmarish. I feared that a single misstep would send me falling down through the unknowable mist into a cold and rigid death. It was a feeling of helplessness, a complete surrender of one’s own humanity. Step by step by step. I could feel the presence of a titan loom over us, its foggy tendrils had us completely at its mercy. We had marched silently and reverently onwards towards the sunrise.
Now, I found myself in the embraces of the titan once again. But unlike before, this time it was just me, alone. I clenched my teeth, reinforcing my resolve to follow the girl. I felt my way through the whiteness, looking for something of an entrance. I knew there had to be one. Eventually, I saw it. There was a little trail sign, peaking out from a patch of grass, barely visible, that seemed to mark the beginning of a path. It was a narrow dirt trail, with tall grass on either side, wide enough for just one person. Whether it went up or down I could not tell. “Silver Lake Meadows // 1.5 Mile Trail” it read. Strange… I knew these mountains inside out, and yet I have never heard of such a place. Silver Lake Meadows. A shiver ran down my spine.
Something told me that there was no time to waste, so I started along. To my surprise, as I followed the narrow path, which went neither up or down, merely onwards, the fog lightened a bit and my vision cleared up. I started making out more of my surroundings. Or perhaps I should say lack of surrounding. On either side of me, dew-covered tall-grass stretched out as far as I could see, like a prairie in the midwest. Their deep green color was made diluted and pale by the layer of soft mist that hung over them. There seemed to be no dimension to their appearance, as if they were drawn in by an architect. As if there was no meaning to their existence, the tall-grass offered nothing to the otherwise flat, barren landscape. A place like this simply could not exist in the mountains that I grew up with. Where was I?
A cloud-mist blotted out the sky, rendering anything in the distance to be indecipherable. It was as if I was alone in a dome, with no way of knowing time and space at all. It made me feel isolated and estranged. It was just me, the tall-grass, and the opaque whiteness of the cloud-mist. The whiteness was what bothered me most. It wasn’t a whiteness that brought about images of light or purity. This was the whiteness of nothing, a pure blank. This whiteness was so vague, so impersonal, that it felt stripping… like it was slowly diffusing away the layers of my person. Still, the path before me went onwards. I saw no other option but to follow it to its end. Whatever lay at its end was meant for me to see.
I faithfully put one foot in front of the other, the crunch of my soles reverberating with each step. A dry gust of wind sent a murmur through the tall-grass, breaking the stillness for just a moment. There was a solemnity to the atmosphere, as if the tall-grass was watching me carefully. I got the sense that they knew where they were leading me, and that they felt no sympathy at all. Ahead of me, something began to take shape.
As I drew closer, I immediately saw it for what it was. My pulse quickened.
Before me stood the twin elm trees. The same ones that stood guard at the Balcony’s entrance. A sense of shock took ahold me, the kind you get when a phone call brings news of a loved one’s death. The kind that shakes you to your bones. There was no mistake about it, I knew those trees when I saw them. This was the entrance to my safe place. And yet… it wasn’t. This gate lead to something unknown and unfamiliar. A strange, twisted place. So this was where the girl had come from. I could feel it deep inside of me.
A nervous anxiety filled me to the brim. My mind was swimming with thoughts. I told myself to breathe. In. Out. Whatever the meaning of all of this was… I was about to find out, whether I liked it or not. There was no turning back. I stooped down and stepped through the gate.
I felt something shift. The air had taken on a thin, sterile quality. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything at all. Then, as if a veil had been lifted off my eyes, I saw everything at once.
I was in the middle of a clearing. Familiar patches of grass lined its edges. An arching dome of ferns and trees covered my rear, like an amphitheater. I couldn’t believe it. It was the Balcony.
But of course, it wasn’t my Balcony. It was some sick recreation of it. This version had a completely different atmosphere to it, the same as that of a cemetery or a sacred ritual ground. I immediately got a sense of history and callousness from the area, and I knew that this place had existed for a long, long time.
At the edge of the clearing was a sharp ledge. The grassy slope where I usually lay, the one that normally declines so gently into the lands below, instead jutted down sharply into a straight drop, as if to lure you into a free falling death. Most of the grass and greenery had died, revealing bony slabs of granite beneath it. Most jarring of all was the complete absence of view beyond the ledge. Instead of the comforting townscape that I normally saw, there was a vast swath of what I could only describe as nothingness. Imagine an opaque fog that has no shape or form or substance. I have no other way of painting the picture. It was a nothingness that I could not grasp.
The girl was here, too. But I could not see her. That is, I could merely feel her presence. Perhaps she was beyond the clouds, watching me from a place that I could not get to. At that thought, a haze settled over my psyche. As if I had been tranquilized, I felt a stab of anesthesia creep through my body and dull my senses. Before I knew it, I had sunken into a trance-like state, all thought and feeling escaping me. Trapped in my own head, I was reduced to a faint consciousness.
My feet started moving, as if they had taken on a life of their own. I watched numbly as they slowly carried me forth to the ledge. The Balcony’s ledge. How poetic. Mist swirled around me, spraying into my face and fading away. The granite made no sound as I stopped at its edge. Only cold neutrality existed up here on this platform. Beneath me was the grand unknown. And there I was, a step away from eternity.
What is like to stare fate straight in the eye? I took a good, hard look at the nothingness before me. In the cloud, I searched for anything that I could hold onto, anything to prevent me from falling. I searched for my mother. I searched for my past classmates, my old friends. I searched for my first prom date, my first kiss. I searched for all the time I spent at the library, tearing through novels. I searched for all the time I spent at the cafe, making lattes for folks. I searched for the image of myself, lying on the grass, on the right side of the mountain, gazing up at the sky.
I pushed all of my energy into that gaze, as I knew that a lapse of control would spell my end. I needed to find a reason. Something that would drag me out. The fog stared blankly back at me with my own eyes. There was nothing to see. My shoulders slumped. Perhaps I should let go, I thought, and accept whatever happens. I let my mind wander for the last time. I thought about the beautiful view I saw every morning before work. I thought about everything I have done in my young life, everything that I have yet to do. I thought about all the cups of coffee I’ve ever made, all the people I’ve ever served in my lifetime. Did they like my drinks? Was it any good? I guess I’ll never know…
Somewhere beyond, judgment passed, and a levy broke. I felt a surge of blood rush to my head, as if I had been turned upside down. There was a pounding sensation in the distance. I thought I saw a shape flicker faintly in the emptiness. There was a new heaviness to my gaze, like I was put under a hallucinogen. Suddenly, the fog suddenly began to morph and take form, and within it I saw all the pieces of my past come streaming toward me. Memories swam in chaos, joining together and splitting off like rivers and streams. Images of myself flashed before me, dissolving like sand and reconstructing themselves immediately after. It all seemed so indecipherable at face value, but at that moment, things seemed to make sense.
Standing on that ledge, inches away from my death, something clicked deep inside me – I saw myself with a crystalline clarity. In that space, things seemed to finally fall in place. I saw every piece of my life fit together as if it was a puzzle, how each piece gave way to the next. I saw myself working at the cafe from the perspective of a customer. I saw myself interacting with others from the vantage point of a cloud. Once more, I saw myself in the mirror, through my own eyes. These perspectives blended into each other and melted into nothingness. What lies on the other side of that nothingness? Something that was not meant for me.
At that point, I snapped out of my trance, as if I had been pulled out from under the sea. Whatever mysterious energy that powered this place had withdrawn. I no longer felt the girl’s presence either. Slowly, carefully, I backed away from the ledge. The mist let me be. I had survived judgment. With a dazed sort of lightness in my head, I looked all around me, at this place I could not identify, in a part of the mountains that does not exist. Scattered feelings swirled inside of me, but I could not decipher them anymore. I turned around and started back towards the gate.
Lifting up the branch and stepping through to the other side, I was surprised to see a familiar sight. It was the good old forested trail I took to reach my Balcony. I followed it all the way back to the clearing where I would usually park my car, and like it was any ordinary morning, there it sat waiting for me. I let out a sigh, letting my being relax. I heard birds chirping in the distance. The sky above me was clear blue, with not a single cloud in sight. I put the key in the ignition. I knew that I had a morning shift to attend to, and that I wasn’t going to be late for the life of me.
So that was what happened to me last fall. Real head-scratcher, huh?
I suppose now is the time for me to catch you up with my life as it has gone after such events. It’s springtime now in Maine, and it’s starting to rain a bit more. The trees have taken on a vibrant green hue, and the air has been revitalized with a crispness of sorts.
To be honest, things are not too different now. In fact, barely anything has changed at all. I still work full-time at the cafe. I still go up to the Balcony pretty often, although not as much as before. I still live a simple, quiet life, with no immediate plans of moving out of my hometown.
I will say this, though – something died inside of me that day, and something new took its place. I’ve been cultivating it and taking care of it with every bit of my ability. For one, I started taking my job at the cafe a lot more seriously. So much so that I got promoted to assistant manager at the top of this year. As a result, I’ve become a lot more passionate about the coffee that I make and the community that surrounds the cafe.
Most importantly, I feel that a weight had been lifted off of me. There’s a new vitality that I feel in the air when I drive to work. It is as if I’ve rediscovered the world and I’m seeing it through new eyes. I feel contented to keep going down this path until an opportunity comes for me to take hold. I am strangely faithful that something of the sort will be here shortly.
In my memory, I no longer have a clear understanding of what exactly transpired during that month last fall. It is all very blurred and hazy in my mind. I can’t even bring back the mental image of what the Silver Lake Meadows looked like in detail. I am only left with impressions and feelings. What you have just read is simply a recreation of such. Think of it as a written note of a previous night’s dreams. Some parts will be lost in translation.
I’m not sure if what I experienced was meant to be remembered. I’m not sure if my experience was also meant solely for me, either. I do see, though, its significance in my life. That is why I am sharing it with you. I hope that you, too, can understand it in your own way. So if this story speaks to something deep inside of you, then please accept my kindest wishes, with the utmost of sincerity, that you may never in your life find yourself standing amongst the mist-covered tall-grass of the Silver Lake Meadows.
tannoyblanc 