Monday, May 23, 2011

The lake

This is fiction.

The lake is always there, though it does not form the stage. With a backdrop of snow clad mountains that roll down in hills towards the lowlands, the lake is this momentous’ orchestration’s base, the lowly slowly carrying train, the movements of which are but almost inconceivable in the vast scale of their pattern.

This lake swells into the town’s bay, its finger stretching, pointing, to the busy shore full of buildings and boats, people and animals, ever restlessly hither-tithering. It gently pushes against the quays and bridges, extending itself through the city, past the shore, into a river; a flow into the lake, through the lake, and from the lake. Ever flowing yet ever resting, the lake is always there, though under its clear surface, this molten sky-snow-ice-glass is never still.

A figure stands at the lake, and all around along the shore so many others, walking, talking, inattentive. This figure stands, his gaze rests far out somewhere on the water, drawn out and wide by a longing in himself, a longing that the lake takes on, draws out into the endless imperfect reflection of one half of this world. The stage is ever reflected by the base line, yet never same.

While he stands at the lake, with all his longings and his sadness, with his loss and all the contents of his little fragile human heart, a million other moments, happenings, events, surround him, arbour-like. Never on person has the might to better, clear, make whole, what broken threads and fractured porcelain innocence lie between two frail and failing human beings. The hurt and hurting, the great loss of words and incongruence of all the relations led from mouth to mouth, all of it collected in the vessel of the human mind, ever to remember, ever to collect; nothing of it in permanence for the lake, its flowing, its liquid glass imperfect reflection, its receptacle of change.

Above the lake, birds fly. Clouds drift by. The sun shines, the stars glister, the moon sings. Sometimes, the sky kisses the lake. Ever, the sky lies in the lake, imperfectly, ever changing.

A human longing, a human hurt, is cast out over the water-sky.