The Parking Lot of the Gods

Not far from the red blinking lights at the intersection, there's a little park with a small hill where, on sunny winter mornings after snow, the children love to go sledding. A thin line of ragged trees edges the park and frames the sledding hill, upraised branches silhouetted against the bright western sky. Never more than twenty yards wide, this feral meander of trees and tangled underbrush divides the park from the neighboring hospital, a lingering memory here of a wildness that's been swept from most other corners of the town. 

The low anonymous buildings of the hospital--physical therapy here, chest pain there--are surrounded by long wide aprons of crumbling grey parking lot. During business hours, the sun glints on plastic, glass, and steel, but later there's an emptiness that sweeps everything into an absent embrace. Pain becomes memory. The sky is silent, and trees move mute to unseen breezes. The fading asphalt is cracked and zig-zagged with ribbons of congealed tar and weather-battered yellow paint.  

This is the place I call the Parking Lots of the Gods. 

For the best part of twenty years I've walked here, haunting the quiet suburban vastnesses, visiting with lamp posts, watching the blowing leaves skitter across gravel and blacktop. There are mysteries here, an edge to things that grips me like a dream I can't shake, as if what's always been present finally demands its due, reminders heaped like the moldering mounds of grass clippings marking the beginning of the tree line. 

At certain posts I pause, look up, move on. Luminaire canopies, sightless eyes on stalks, stare down in blind fascination. Alien familiars tower overhead. As I walk the lots, the angles to distant buildings change, squares slide into triangles, alchemies of metal and brick as meat body moves through invisible networks of spectral segments. Gossamer geometries of sky and cloud and concrete flood through like light, quadrilaterals of glass and grassy congruences reflecting like mirrors. I feel the threads brush through me. The hair on my arms is upright, golden in the sunlight. 

Later, as fading light steals empty space away into darkness, a thickening beneath the trees heralds a coming into being. Becoming night, a thinness that catches me off-guard. There's something present where before was only an attentive hint of stillness in the air, a silence building behind the breeze. The shadowed lamp posts reach into the sodium sky like runes. Letters from a secret alphabet.

What is it takes notice as I move through, rearranging tangents with each breath and gesture, breaking invisible sight lines with each step and memory? Something, something half occulted, something coming--far from wicked--when I least expect it. Perhaps my frail human senses aren't tuned in to this signal? . . . 

I get fuzzy like that.

There's a sentience in this place where no-one wanders but me, as if the edges of things are fringed with color-split radiance, gorgeous reds and greens and cyans lurking like bright shadows at the margins.

"Secret Sun/Balsamic Dark Moon" by @TamlynRogers

That shimmer, that movement repeating, like a branch swaying into sight beneath a flickering lamp, now dark, now bright, now dark again, feels like it demands closer examination. But I keep moving, stepping through the yellow lines and the snaking black threads of tar, each footfall a whisper of what comes next, a stealthy revelation. 

The lights at the intersection blink red. 

Off. On. Off. On. Off. On.