Worm Moon

That's what it is tonight. Or, more accurately what it will be at 7:00 AM my time, plus or minus a minute. The name feels apropos at some visceral level, even though it only means that the old farmers noticed that the moon happened about the same time the ground softened up and the earthworms made a reappearance. No matter how dramatic it seems, the meat and bone of the world is really just stitched together from such small stories.

I had a terribly late day today, and will have another full one tomorrow. Not a big thing — it's the nature of my life. But it did bring me into the driveway this late, which is to say, late enough that I noticed the worm moon was lighting the place like badly filtered daylight.

I stood there in the dark, the sky so hard and black it felt as glossy as polished obsidian, the brilliant moon mounted silently on that infinite midnight bowl, a mottled lump of granite pretending to be a jewel. An erratic, swirling, cold north wind was making the tree limbs moan, raising a shushing sheet of rattling sound from the bushes. I hadn't even glanced at the moon in months till tonight. It hasn't been mine for a really long time now, and tonight was no different. It hung there pouring pallid indifference over me. Over the world.

The biting wind chattered around the fence and flapped my coat, careless dead fingers riffling through my hair, the perfect background to the grey and black dreamscape into which I'd fallen, becoming the only guttering candle of life left in the world, for all I could tell.

I watched the sullen thing for a long time, trying to find the handle on it I used to grab and hold.

"Fuck you, rock," I finally told it, "I owned you once." It wouldn't answer, but a gust of cold air chattered around my legs.

Old times, old friends, and old lovers rushed up on me for some not very well defined reason, peering out at me from my past, from that place where they're preserved in the darkening, thickening, cold glass of memory. Not nostalgia or any particular wish to go back. Not any more than usual, anyway. But standing there in that grey light, I was suddenly overwhelmed with — tenderness(?)  Not the right word. The desire for them to be doing well, for them to have whatever it was they were looking for back when I knew them.

I hope they are. I hope they do.

Another eddy of cold air swirled around me and I shivered, shaking off the past, and walked into the warmth of now — but they still linger a bit, those ghosts called by the moon, murmuring and stirring there in that dark prism. So I wrote this so they'd have somewhere to go. At least for a little while.

And now I'm going to bed, and tomorrow or the next day, or the next I'll re-read this and maybe remember when I was visited for a few minutes on an odd night of worms.

In Our Next Episode: I discover that my life continues to generate a past faster than I can find places to put it, despite my best efforts.