11:25 a.m. - 2004-06-07
Uncle John's Band
I woke up this morning around 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. I lay there in the dark, listening to far-off traffic--the hummings and rumblings of big trucks and the quieter shushing of cars who secretly dream of being bullet trains.

It made me think of a motel in Ohio I stayed at once. I was moving from Pennsylvania to southern Illinois, driving cross-country in an enormous brown station wagon. The motel was all by itself next to the highway, surrounded by miles of yellow-gold fields, not a tree or house in sight. Almost surreal in its loneliness. I'd been used to trees everywhere, framing the tiny bit of visible sky. Here, the sky was so enormous you began to understand why indian legend believes that the sky is a giant bowl over the earth.

I stood in the field next to the motel, looking up at the sky, marveling. It made me dizzy to be so surrounded by all that blue, unbroken by clouds or even birds. The enormity of everything took by breath away and I laid down, gasping for air. And then all there was around me was the humming of traffic on the highway, the warm breeze on my sweaty, sticky skin and the blue, overpowering, oppresive, intimidating blue of the sky. I got the distinct feeling that the power of gravity might fail at any moment and I'd begin to fall endlessly uncontrollably into that sky and be lost forever, swallowed up by that huge yawning abyss.

All this triggered this morning at 4am by the sound of far-away traffic. So I lay there, cozied up in my bed, swathed in down comforter (alright, I admit it, I'm obsessed with my bed) and thought about that feeling. It's a little like falling in love, overwhelming and huge and scarey. And like that memory of the sky, it never goes away, sometimes it has you sitting bolt upright at 4am reliving the intensity, breathless and sweaty.

Even though years have passed and Josh is now old and married, I still think of him at that time and place when we first fell in love, when he proposed, so many things. It didn't work out, but it still makes me happy to remember and glad that I've had those experiences and memories to look back on. It was terrific to have the breath knocked out of me by sheer intensity of feeling, and the fact that it happened recently with someone else, means that much more. And it's made me realize that even though love can emulate with exquisite accuracy the most firey torturous pit of the blackest, deepest hell, it's still worth it.

So that's what I have to say about that.

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