ANY GIVEN STAR

Beautiful Buzz / 2021 / Abstract painting / Russell C. Smith

Let us walk down by the way of the wind. Youth’s circumference closed again. Nervous anticipation greeted lengthy shadows, and our official request to the sky and the moon got lost in the mail. I wandered through humid evenings, sensing heat lightning in the near distance. Often, I’d be standing in a field across from her house, conversing with frogs and crickets. The gravitational pull of memories made me walk in the darkness, through fog, neighborhood parks, and under flickering streetlights. Onward I wandered, until I was drawn back to the specific house of memory. I was the farthest point from any given star, untethered, floating. As we know, any given point in time immediately rejoins the flux and flow. Sometimes not knocking on a front door is enough to alter a star’s path, the voice in my head informed me. My clarity and her dreamily never quite synchronized. Many nights, I could feel a far-off meteor asking me to befriend it, and thereby welcome it to my galaxy. If fragments of this meteor broke off as it entered earth’s atmosphere and screamed through the night sky over the Gulf Coast of Florida, I’d call her early the next morning and tell her with an easy conviction I did it. I’d gotten cozy with a well-meaning meteor. It’s why a portion of the Gandy Bridge was taken out, and miraculously, there were no fatalities. Every scene in this outer space meets morning drive-time incident was due to an understanding I’d developed with the meteor, whom I’d named Rachel. I found out through traversing identical streets on a multitude of nights I could connect with shooting stars while simultaneously reading the minds of drivers peeling out of drugstore parking lots, and turning onto Park Boulevard. I stayed awake for countless nights, first living on my rooftop, and then I perfected my season of insomnia in my backyard in a sleeping bag on dewy grass. Watching the majestic shift of constellations rotating across the night sky. Distant solar systems transmitted secret messages about living freely in the inside-out world. It was around this time I began writing my memoir on the night wind.