Where gravel roads meet asphalt

When I look out the driver's side window into the close woods, I see the tunnels the deer make as they move through their usual routines. In my mind I see an adult doe, her looking over shoulder at me, as tails swish back and forth and flick off a worry. Ears twickle and peak out from a slender head and a tongue barely flashes out of a mouth still chewing on twig and leaves torn from their source. Dark eyes of the deer stare back into my space, watching my truck and not so much watching me. But the hollow beneath the branches is empty: only dark shadows and mixed green swallow fading day and turning it into twilight, and then I'm passing one more time again as I'm driving up one more time again this slight incline of gravel road, another Thursday shift complete. I love the sound of small, sharp rocks under my truck's tires: crunching, crumbling grinding underneath me and vibrating, pinging, shivering upwards through me, through my body and into my head, bobbling along on as it does and turning to the front.

Just ahead I catch the dark red flash of a red fox undulating across the road, black-tipped tail pointing backwards and tan little streak darting forwards. I will see the deer I imagined shortly when I make the driveway, but for now I'm reimaging in slower motion the fox I just think I saw. I think it was a fox. What I really saw were patches of my dreams taking shape and forming information just as quickly as it passes away. When I pass by the spot where I think I saw that fox, I look through upright spaces between dense young pine and ask the fox to look backwards over its shoulder, or even turn so slightly and pose, but I didn't open my mouth so the fox didn't bother to stop. Little pink strips of flag hang off small wooden stakes jammed into the ground, spaced regularly and marking off where the humans will have to stop their endeavors and give space to one other human, a specific kind of human, one they will call The Owner. Land not yet known who owns it.

The last orange of the sunset between the gentle dance of poplars and oaks, a bursting cloud of oranges and yellows and a subtle hunger of red behind black silhouettes like hands and skin and forks. In ten minutes it will all be gone, and blue grey haze of a humid oncoming night takes over from there. High feathering fingers of cirrus so high above let slip some sunlight for me. Luxury and grace from those above.

I gift a small top off of water to the little struggle of plants on my balconey, shooing away a fuzzy and unknown insect whose cotton and webs I mistook for a fungus on the stalk of the polka dotted perennial. All the diversity of these humble plants are here on my balconey, and below a spastic twerm from a bullfrog firing off its thought. It will be somewhere from twenty to forty seconds before it will have enough motivation to offer up another thought as loud, but in the meantime it's just listening and breathing and taking it all in with black, glassy eyes unfocused. It listens to the rising pitch and song of the cicadas in the trees, reaching that crescendo of vibrance that they get before they shake it up and throw around some other ideas and then start over with slightly different frequency and speed. Other brother near him lets out his singular sharp twerm, and then they're on the same wavelength. They're talking. Little drops of water slowly make their way down dancing down one of the hydrophobic leaves of this rubber tree. Clone of a clone of a clone from a tree watched over by Roziers two states away, this rubber tree I've been getting to know has been with me now two years or three feet. Tiny spear point limb buds out from where I finally made the cut, and years from now a thick branch will remember there used to be a leaf unfurling where it became trunk.

I could never be the only human in the room, because all rooms are filled with ghosts of every human who pass before me, and they are all moving about these rooms, each room, each ghost, because they haven't realized they've died and become ghosts. It's okay, I'm no longer scared of them, because I get that. I understand that. I am already a ghost and not yet aware I've died, that this is the afterlife, and somewhere just beyond a ripple in the fabric of spacetime is a slightly frightened person watching me not looking over my shoulder while sitting here typing and correcting and stopping, typing and correcting and stopping. Eventually they'll blink for a moment and I'll no longer be there in the ripple, but fully obscured in my own spacetime doing what a ghost who's not yet aware of its death does. He is living his life one day at a time and looking forward to moments all from then to now, when he will stop and slide out from skin and fingers and hair and stubby toes and go back to being the shimmering wavelet he was on the ocean surrounding this amazing, wonderful, harrowing but silky planet.

Just on the other side of my closed door, the early night cicada are chzichzchering and getting ready. It is a dark and moonless night oncoming. This is a night when dark things with blank and glassy eyes wandering under hollowed branches pass by, when everyone who sings at night and fills it with their crazed desire for companionship or camaraderie entertains a guest. You listen to me in your own voice, just as I listen to them in my own voice, because we are always a certain kind of vibration in the minds of the ones who catch us, as we are, as we dance, as we streak, as we write, in this dark kind of night.