by Sam Vincent
He watched the constellations as they darkened into daylight. The sand was cold beneath his outstretched body. Yet it wasn’t bitterly cold, the kind of cold that leaves you feeling like there is no warmth left in the world. It was a comfortable cold, a fresh cold, that renders you calm and in control. The jet black sky reluctantly gave in to navy. Navy was then ceded to grey. The eastern sky was graced with a daring dash of yellow, which spread its joie de vivre far into the heavens. Orange. Red. Brilliant rays of colour washed over his weary form, energising him as they would a humble blade of grass. He was grateful for that. He needed that.
It had been a hard few months for him. Assignments to complete. Study for the upcoming examinations. There comes a point when that protesting voice inside gets too loud. He heard it, and realised what his existence had become. He was an automated slave, serving his eternally elusive goals. It’s when you lose what defines you as living that you’re gone. He’d lost sight of who he was, what he liked and who he wanted to be. Those grand dreams had been excluded from his present constrained reality. Where he was heading no longer existed. The dreams no longer existed. There was only an overheating machine churning out notes and quotes, oblivious of its lack of company inside a dark and closed reality.
Lying on the sand, he permitted his thoughts to wander. They gracefully floated away from him, like golden particles of dust illuminated within a shaft of light. Making no effort to catch them, he drifted into a state of blissful detachment. It was as if by remaining perfectly still on a deserted beach at six o’clock in the morning, his soul could leap into the skies above, gliding past the clouds and dotted islands of the harbour. He had found his freedom from everything he was, had to be and had to do. He was no longer on the beach. He was two hundred metres up in the air. Diving through pink clouds and staring directly at the unblinking sun. He was an albatross, basking in his dominion of the skies and making no secret of it. Speeding faster than he would ever have imagined possible, before plunging freefall into the dark and mysterious ocean. Everything was within his reach, and the world’s wonders would never end. He was free.
In a moment of weakness, he allowed his practical side to sneak back into his consciousness. How long could he remain horizontal on a beach for? He would be hungry soon. His soul was up in the heavens, but what goes up must eventually come down. Then he was back. And revving into overdrive. He had to be home before his family realised he had deserted them to lie on the beach. There was no way he could handle a scene. And now a headache, another headache was coming on. He had school to get to. Assignments. Lists. That black and finite reality was waiting to be crawled back into. No. He was not going back in. Not there. He was disturbed by the sound of softly crunching sand. Then he saw her. She regarded him coolly, with a smile that could make all the wrongs of the world right in a split second.
It is incredible what a smile can do. In that instant, it became dazzlingly clear to him that the battles every day brought were worth it. She regarded him with careworn eyes. Eyes of supernatural articulation, conveying to him everything he would ever need to know. There was someone, someone in this wide world who loved him. Just as he was. She would be there to stand behind him, no matter what the stars so unceremoniously hurled down at him. His mind, still feeling disoriented from its brief excursion, took its time to recall how she was the real reason he had managed so far. She was his angel. His mum. With her interest in his troubles, incredible capacity to listen, and constant presence as a source of joy in his life, she had been the one on the outside trying to break open his dull, black reality. It was shattered now, and while he found himself grounded once again, there was something more to his existence. Her. It was time to stand up.
His soul was back down on earth, but maybe that wasn’t so bad after all. He had so much to do, so much to be. But at least she was there. His angel, was there. And she wasn’t going away. All the good things in life that lay beyond the confines of his finite reality started to come back to him. Chatting about the most ridiculous topics with his friends. The printed and bound portals that whisked him into other worlds. Cocktails in the sun. And smiles. Was he ready to return to it all? Could he? In a brief moment of insight, he recalled the timeless words of Van West. You just do what’s in front of you until you die. Then you don’t do it anymore. But he was okay with that now.