if you look up
If you look up, the moon has a foggy rainbow ring. It’s called a lunar halo. Moonlight passes through ice crystals in clouds and bends into all of its component colors, like sunlight through a prism.
If you look up, the stars sparkle. You can fix your posture by bending over into a C to see every single star. My mind goes blank seeing the stars. I described it like a vacuum cleaner running around in my mind to a girl I just met at party. Her response “that’s not what I expected you to say, I thought maybe you’d say it cleansed it like water.” She expected the stars to cleanse a mind as beautifully as they shimmer. I said, “no, I really did mean vacuum cleaner.” It wasn’t beautiful, my mental cleanse.
If you look straight, you see faces. Expressions of people around you. I saw the shy delight of the girl selling apples and pears at a farm stand as she explained them to me. The french butter pears that melt on your tongue, the ripe macintoshes that drip with sweetness, the hierloom sierra beauty’s that taste as fresh as a sip of water. There’s even the winter banana apple that actually kind of tastes like banana. We were apple tasting like you go wine tasting. I’d never thought of what apples taste like on my tongue. Being present in something, anything unlocks whole new worlds in little details.
If you look straight, you see words. Street signs, book sentences, instructions. Millions of people read those street signs every day. I read notes. One of my best friends wrote me notes on a typewriter. Notes that bore straight into my soul.
Life usually moves at light speed. There’s beauty in the vortex, in the speed, in the eye of the hurricane. In a world where everyone is saying “slow down” what if you just went faster. Tell me you don’t want the adrenaline, a thrill.
I spent a day without my phone and I looked up and I looked straight. It felt like being 10 years old on summer vacation, losing track of days even though it was just a single day. My friend said it felt like he hadn’t worked for a month. It was just a day.