Clocks are the Crickets of the Indoors

I was laying in my hammock when I realized that all my problems had gone away. The only thing I could think about was the feeling of being held by a piece of fabric, which was being held by two trees, which were being held by the earth itself. A bit of a circumferential way of saying that the earth was holding me, too.

When I was laying in my hammock, my body knew exactly what to do. The only instructions it gave me were to curl up into as small a package as possible to stop my warmth from escaping. It would take things from there, it told me. And it did. The thoughts I was harboring from my nine previous waking hours of the day seemed to have no use in the hammock. My body was busy with more immediate matters, like feeling and seeing and hearing.

I felt an itchy feeling at the base of my skull right behind my ear. And I felt the cold, cozy sensation of being under a blanket when there’s a chill in the air. I felt the support of the stretchy fabric under my heavy head. I felt my eyes wanting to close, and closing.

When I poked my head out of the hammock, my field of vision expanded infinitely. The full moon lit up my surroundings.

“This is not nighttime,” I thought, “it’s too bright for that.” But it was nighttime.

There are no colors in the nightworld, just thousands of black leaves and the white glow on the grass under me. A big black sky poked with the faint white pinpricks of stars. I try to remind myself that the leaves and grass and sky do have color: green and green and blue. My eyes insist that they do not.

I could hear the humming static of the river a few hundred feet away and the chirping of crickets and frogs. One of the crickets was very close by, and its chirping was so loud that it demanded all of my attention. It was keeping time, chirping to a tempo that only it knew. It was trying to remind me that I’m here.

After a while, its chirping stopped.

My ears tried to zoom in on where the sound had been coming from and waited for the chirping to resume. It didn’t.

Its cricket friends would have to pick up the slack while it took a break. They did.

When I went inside, there was a noticeable and offensive flood of light and color, and a disquieting vacuum of sound and sensation. Easy come, easy go / When it rains, it pours / etc. I turned the lights off and settled in, remembering the feeling of being held by a building. The only sound in here is the tick-tocking of the clock. It keeps time and reminds me that I’m here. Its tempo is 60 ticks per minute. It will not stop.