On the night of the autumnal equinox, I was immortal

I had parked next to that huge stretch of field, where the cows wander up alongside the road, their mouths shifting back and forth like two separate clashing pieces as they gnaw, their blank stares taking in the road like mine take in the midnight sky. The only thing that separated me from them was a three-strung wire property fence. I laid out on the top of my car, with its cold aluminum at my back, eyes aligned up above. September still held such warm nights - I'd hoped to simply lie and watch the sky as I tend to enjoy doing, but the atmosphere played a cruel trick and covered the blackness with its pillow clouds. The only things left to see were empty plains, rolling foothills and the clouds obscuring the skyline. They were a mix of tan and dull grey, those muscles of the sky, and they menaced me.

But I stayed put, vowing with all my integrity that I would not rest until the cloud cover ventured on to more inviting territory. The former skywatcher had now become the cloudwatcher. And to be perfectly fair, those clouds were quite intriguing. The shade of the inside always differed slightly from the shade of the outer fringe. The smaller sized of them marched along speedily while the vast hulking behemoths crept without any sense of urgency. I wanted to join them and drift like driftwood in the sea. I wanted to break apart and recombine with other wispy pieces as an everchanging collage, always different, always new but still invariably the same. I wanted to watch with unblinking eyes made of lightning, hear with echoes of thunder, and taste with raindrop fingertips that brushed across the land. Those clouds!

The warmth was fleeting. From the east behind me, a breeze came and swirled around me and caused the cows to balk and turn away. They groaned as they sauntered off to find welcome elsewhere. A lick of water touched my upturned wrist. Another bled into my shirt near my navel. A few more arrived: my bare ankle, my scalp, my palm. So, the rain had come to see me off, had it! Oh ho - but there was nowhere that I would go to seek shelter, no cowardice in me! Not at eleven thirty on this great autumnal equinox, on this day of this year! The rain hastened its pace and sunk its watery fangs into my flesh, tenderly, almost apologetically. A sudden burst lighted up the horizon, followed by the tense roll of distant thunder. My clothing became drenched and my face saturated with the coming rain, that pure nectar of the heavens. My hair lay pasted against the formed steel bracing my head. My brows could no longer protect my eyes as they welled up with the downpour and dripped streakingly across my cheeks in mock sorrow.

A closer strike of light. A louder timpani of thunder. My body as wet as the rain itself. This sweet storm marking the death of summer, the coming of autumn, the season of higan where the walls between the living and the departed opened and the other side of the river of death is bridged for but a few brief moments. Oh storm, do your worst, bring a swarm of spirits to appeal to me, drown me in melancholy. This night is mine! Lightning erupted directly in front of me in the distance, its barren tree leaving an imprint on my eyelids as the accompanying boom shook my eardrums and boiled over me.

I began singing, quietly, one of my favorite songs. "Sleep will not come to this tired body now...!" But the intensity of the storm's volume sang louder, and my words were lost in the howling breeze. I clutched the rails on the roof of my car and secured myself, while smiling open-mouthed upward at the roiling batch of stormclouds, churning and flailing. Join us! they seemed to say. I laughed of eternity and savored the rain that fell into my mouth, the same rain that composed the wine that Alexander the Great had drunk at mealtime, the same seawater that the monstrous squids of the deep inhaled into their gills before being harpooned by seafaring men who knew no better, the same water that entered the soil from the decaying bodies of soldiers who clutched their wounds and died in the act of defending what each of them knew to be most honorable, the same snow that called to me each new winter season, the same tears that my mother tried to withhold as I drove away to find a destiny of my own. The live-giving ambrosia of the gods.

Lightning bit every grain of sand around me; thunder rumbled and roared in upheaving earthquakes, swallowing cities and sending me teetering this way and that on my perch; rain flooded the highlands, drowned the livestock, and nurtured the wildflowers. I watched. I was the clouds.

Then it all lessened and the rain fell more softly. The show of noise and light drifted towards the more inviting territory I had earlier desired for it. The puppeteer in the clouds was prepared to play to another audience. And eventually it stopped completely. I had been within it for not more than two hours. My wet skin and clothing was not uncomfortable, I was still fairly warm and besides, it was nothing more than water. It was harmless and delicious.

I watched in earnest as the clumps of clouds in the west, in front of me, broke apart in their center and formed a v-shaped opening over the road. A single burning bulb of white light was stationed there in the middle of the newly opened sky.

Are you awake tonight, Altair? You can see that I am. Don't worry about me. I can take whatever is thrown my way. I am immortal. I am still here.