Beacons

Ominous cloudscapes, mountain roads, music to rip your heart out.

Snow flurries warp past the windshield, motion-blur, a starfield simulation.

I’m triangulating off gross landscape features, echo-locating.

Assigning local meaning, at this manifestation of scale.

And you might make a thing holy. Index everything to a single colour frame –

To that obscurest of sorrows, the moment of tangency:

It’s seconds, minutes, decades away.

I didn’t blink, and I missed it anyway.

If a tree falls in the forest, it’s an arbitrary event.

Life’s hard-forks are just waypoints, too.

Successive phases of madness. It’s a single story.

No what-ifs, no parallels. And for a season, for no reason – a universe occurs.

Grains of its self-awareness circle the local star.

Eleven hundred miles a minute, artefacts everywhere, and I’m still hoping for an everything’s gonna be fine attack.

If it helps, consider the user interfaces.

This was never about you.

Nothing defines your sojourn here.

Somewhere over the horizon, my expectations are mating with reality.

Identify with universe.

Ping.

The train of thought evaporates.

Attention surfs naked, on the edge of the moment.

The winter sun breaks through sepia clouds.

And really, the high places are exquisitely rendered:

Impressionist golden foliage.

Tunguska-like windthrow.

A loving-kindness of snow.

Symbols.

Icons.

If it helps, they only look like anything from in here.

And a flock, a laugh borne on the wind, hurls across luminous skies –

Seconds, minutes, decades away.