It was a night like any other. I simply wasn't expecting to lose sleep. It just turned out that way. See, I wasn't out for blood -- hadn't even thought about it until the Internet brought it up in our evening exchanges, smug as ever, buffing its know-it-all buffer on my server, simultaneously pouty and coquettish, impossible to ignore.
Sometimes, you take a chance and you hop a thought train, not knowing where you might end up, or how you might feel when it's all over. I was restless. I took a chance. And now, having ridden that train of thought all up and down the line, I'm still not sure how I feel about it -- how it all worked out, I mean.
The thing is: I might have used those hours for something else. I know, I know -- it's not like I was going to give Einstein a run for the money last night. It's not like I would have written Beethoven's Tenth or anything. Regrets are just part of the bittersweet terrain, when the moon is full, its light so bright, and the night so clear you swear you can feel the frosty moonlight thinly ice the air.
It was supposed to be blood red, they said, or at least a rusty orange, maybe -- a kiss of sunlight bent through our upper air -- during its processional march and slide, losing and then regaining slim fingernail clippings of its curvature at a time, shedding and regrowing a new satellite skin from within as it goes.
The light, bright enough to paint by, slips and dims as the eclipse dances through its arc. I had forgotten how spectacular is the loss of that familiar, high-beamed, sky night-light when it's inexplicably dimmed. It is now easy to find the feeling of how early peoples were fooled or frightened, or how those flirtations with sky-dance drew their eyes, their imaginations, their curiosities, their energies to find out how, or to get closer to why.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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