Things Left Unsaid

For most of my childhood I lived in a village with a population of less than one thousand people. It was where two small highways intersected. A few side streets with houses that were all quite unique. Everyone knew everyone else. A small enough village that we would sometimes have to drive to the nearest town if the shops and services on the main street didn't have something we needed. There were fields and farms surrounding it in all directions.

It is funny to me now when I think back to my life in that tiny village. It sometimes feels like I'm recalling a dream, or like past life regression or something. It is just so far removed from my life now here in the city, and is now so far back in time. Another lifetime. Back to a time before the internet existed. Back before cable TV, Nintendo and cell phones. I think back sometimes to that time in general, and recently to one night in particular.

Me and a couple of other boys were all the same age. We would meet up regularly, and find things to do. I was always the quiet one, and I was smaller than the other two. Added to my being small and quiet, the contrast seemed more when they occasionally could be kind of loud and hyper. Sometimes troublemakers. Gave me a feeling a lot of the time that I was along for the ride more than a participant in the action.

The night in particular that I was recently thinking about was sort of an unusual one. We had learned earlier in the day that there was going to be a meteor shower. It was mostly just a typical night, but when sunset began we were riding our bikes around the edge of the village trying to find an open space suitable to watch the meteor shower. Everywhere we tried seemed too near to tall trees, or to sources of light.

One of my friends suggested the field that was just beyond his backyard. We made our way back to his place, and let our bikes fall in the grass before proceeding from the yard out into the field. Daylight was almost entirely gone from the sky by then.

The field had been plowed a few days prior to that night. The furrows cut into the soil were deep even ruts like waves on a lake. They were cracked and hardened from sunny dry days after it was plowed. There was not even a slight breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. If the moon was illuminated that night it would have been less than half, or just a sliver near the horizon. I do not recall. I do recall it being exceptionally dark that night. The kind of deep darkness that can only happen when the moon is either not in sight at all, or not visible enough to be obtrusively bright. Conditions could not have been a more perfect for a meteor shower.

When I got about twenty meters or so out into the field I felt, and said it seemed far enough. Being the smallest of the three of us, traversing over those deep furrows was tough going. From farther out in the field they called me names and laughed (lightheartedly really), and urged me on. It was not as hard for them, and they always had the tendency to take things to another level I suppose. They were likely far enough, but went farther anyway.

The field was not huge, but was big enough that when we got to where they stopped, which ended up being about the middle of it; the lights in house windows and street lights just looked like tiny dots of light on the horizon. I looked back, but couldn't pick out the backyard that we had entered the field from. It made me slightly uneasy.

A few minutes later I rejoined them. They were sitting on the crest of a furrow. I was out of breath at that point, but it settled fairly quickly. Then one of them had the idea to lay right down with the back of his knees over top of the crest of one furrow, and then the next furrow became a backrest. It was perfectly designed for us to lay in. So there we were. Three young boys laying in the middle of a plowed field in the dark, staring up at the sky while chattering away. Young boys being boys, as they say.

Then the first meteor silently cut through the sky almost directly above our gaze, and then disappeared as quickly as it came.

All three of us instantly went silent, and became completely still. That silence and stillness is the most thought provoking part of this memory. Like our breaths slowed, and perhaps we were not even blinking as much for fear that we might miss one. It could have been the first and only time we were together and were still and silent like that. When I think back to that moment in time from now I feel like it held a deeper meaning than we would have been able to articulate, or even be aware of.

To us then we were just boys having an adventure, watching a cool thing happen in the night sky. But when it silenced us, and stopped us, it was like we forgot ourselves for however long we remained there that night. When I look back I see those three young boys laying together in a field in the dark, held to the surface of this planet by gravity. Literally, on the edge of, and gazing into infinity, watching ancient objects from cold dark space violently burning up when entering our layer of atmosphere. I couldn't even take a guess at how long we were laying out there that night, or how many we saw. I do know though that we were transformed for the moments we were there. We had forgotten ourselves, and had become part of something much larger than us.