UNFOLDING LIKE FLOWERS IN A NIGHTTIME GARDEN

Crystal Ball / 2018 / Collage by Russell C. Smith

Upon meeting, they didn’t meet in the flesh for months. They spoke all night via mobile phones in darkened rooms, in two Pacific Northwest cities. Video talking, past the midnight hour in the region known as cyberspace, a word coined by the science fiction American Canadian writer, William Gibson. They smiled, laughed, and told their life stories and stories of their lives. Planted seeds in the moment for the future. Feeling the joys of joining, the upwards floating and downwards trajectories. Her ADHD met up with his OCD, and the results were stellar. What gives and what’s happening he thought, inside his veins, flowing upriver to Heartbeat Island. His overflowing subtropical mind, yearning for the Salmon Rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, even before he knew there was such a place. His subconscious layers unfolded like flowers in a nighttime garden. Unfolding like wind unfurling waves on top of lakes. Unfolding with languid luminosity. Unfolding with serendipity and synchronicity as their guides. Her voice didn’t just talk, it sang, and while singing she drew architectural plans on air, on open space, and in hastily sketched notations and numberings on the backs of envelopes. Bursts of transmitting mind-pictures across the waves. Knowing met unknowing, as she jumped into who they were together and what they’d become. Jumped without a parachute, rose up into the clouds, landed firmly on the ground in her brand-new traveling shoes. And the next years of their lives unfolded. From landing on a houseboat in South Lake Union, to a living loft space half a block from Chinatown.