Harmless, Page 2

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  ascendant

  you can’t say we didn’t see it coming... people rising up into the sky... rising up, to paradise or another fate... rising up, as chosen ones... or sinners caught and summoned to reckoning...

  now, we are ascending... some, not many, with their arms stretched wide in graceful surrender... some dumbstruck... some terrified by freedom, come at last...

  I myself am clinging to a garden hose... dangling a hundred feet in the air... just luck I was washing my car when gravity decided it had had enough of us... for as long as I can hold on, not long, I am a fountain of clarity...

  the novelty is exhilarating... it is what we miss when youth is gone... when too much is known... life too familiar... contentment dried and curled at the edges... now, I am at the end of my tether... arisen...

  I had always thought of gravity as being uniform and utterly without prejudice... indifferent to human artifice... unimpressed by opinions... it cared not at all if you were large or small... brilliant or vacuous... moral or mean... animal, vegetable, mineral, solid, liquid, gas, particle or wave... it embraced all with equal affection... a reliable and impartial arbiter in every instance...

  it appears to have changed its mind about that... there are no other objects launching themselves upward, only ourselves... gravity has become selective... taken judgment into its own hands... perhaps it has decided to play the perennial trickster’s joke upon us, and give us what we asked for... to be the highest of all...

  I can understand gravity’s disdain for us... it creates wheeling galaxies... shapes stars and sets them afire... molds planets and bathes them in light and tides... it has called us into being, and we have replied... we have given it calculus... and robbed it of intent... added fantastic formulas to our collection of grizzled gods... made of them all the toys of our childhood... we have imagined ourselves the proper center of all attention, surpassing even gravity with our grasping...

  I don’t know if there’s anything up there except cold and breathless death... but what does anyone know until their time has come... and even then, we are all adept at believing untrue things... and deflecting the encroachments of the obvious... it’s how we tolerate our confused existence... why would we abandon those comforts at the end...

  well, I’m off... wish I could see how it all turns out... I will assume it is all for something and not for nothing... it’s the best I can do, under the circumstances...