I went on
walkabout that night, through the
piles of
snow. The
precipitation had slowed to an
anemic pace - a single lone
flake would drift down from the sky, daring you to
run and catch it in your
mouth. (In a related
note, the snow tasted
great.)
It was cold, and I had a hot toddy and some spiced wine to keep my spirits high. The clouds were low, and the air was still. I had detoured through a neighborhood, an upper-class 'burb, 2.3 kids, a Mercedes minivan, and a dog in the backyard. All the houses were silent, no lights, no shadows, just the steady crunch-crunch of my sneakers on snow echoing through the streets.
Ever have one of those 'last man on the Earth' fantasies? Where all the worldly possessions are still intact, but all life is gone? It was like that, this night had that same dreamy quality, but not quite...
The lights from downtown reflected off of the cloud canopy, reddish-tinged ambience giving everything an unreal, movie-set look. The houses all looked like doll houses, with Barbie and Ken and a pink plastic convertible outside, and a water vapor ceiling overhead, up high... no air was moving. The shrubbery looked plastic, the cars cardboard.
After about five minutes of alcohol retarding neural response and the crunch of snow underfoot, I started to build a fantasy - all this, all these buildings, all these finely-honed details, tire tracks in the snow, footprints large and small, looping about in great circles, all of these were created by another just for my entertainment. I could actually feel all the stars realign themselves so that they now rotated around me. It was a wonderful, if egotistical and dangerous, feeling.
I slowly woke up to the truth of myself among many good people and buried the ego-trip. I put a few snow angels in the ground and went to bed.