“April showers bring May flowers” was how the saying used to be, in years gone past. The snow would slowly melt away, and the ground would go from frozen to soggy to thickets of grass. Now the rains come in May and the brightest blooms in late June. I love light-jacket weather, but there’s not supposed to be this much snow this late every year. It used to be so consistent, the rhyme like a checklist, predictable like clockwork. How could it change so quickly in such a short time? How badly did we fuck up to make things like this?
My memory goes quickly. I can’t remember what the eclipse looked like well enough to re-experience it, but I have impressions. This is something I’d be better off drawing than writing, and maybe one day I will. But today I have words, and I’ll give you those.
The moon is completely black. Parts of the sky are dark, almost but not quite as dark as night, but the moon, with the aura of the corona, was completely black, even more so against the glowing ring around it.
The sky isn’t black or dark grey like it is at night, it was dark dark blue. A deep, rich blue. The clouds were wispy shades of dark grey, tinted with yellows and oranges towards the light parts of the sky. The sky itself has a gradient stretching the entire horizon towards these light spots; at no point was the sky completely dark.
A little below and to the right of the moon, there was a planet or bright star. I forgot to check which one it was.
There was light at both ends of the sky, north towards the city and south where totality had come from. Beyond the city the sky was glowing bright (compared to the rest of the sky), like a sunrise.
It felt amazing. It was shocking, it was magnificent, it was powerful, everything people said it would be. Honestly, the sky kind of stole the show from the sun herself, but that was always the plan, viewing the eclipse over the open water of the St-Lawrence. I’m going to be thinking of the days as “5 days post-eclipse” for a long while.
Then it was over. And now, 10 hours later, those few details, patterns covering a fraction of an image, are all I have left.
I have facts, things I noted or know to be true. I know the birds started singing their evening songs (alice pointed that out) 10ish minutes before totality, but I can’t replicate what that sounded like. I know when totality was almost over it looked like there was a sunrise on both sides of the sky, like you could see the shadowy cloak thrown over the island by the moon, but there’s no image of this in my mind. I remember in the minutes leading up to totality, when you could see the entire sky darkening in real time, it suddenly felt like the sky was fake, like a Truman Show-esqe dome was being dimmed continuously. I can imagine this, but any image is a reconstruction.
Three takeaways from the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse:
1) I need to witness as many of these in my lifetime as possible
2) Next time I need to be in the centre of totality. I didn’t think about how being on the edge of totality would keep parts of the sky bright. Not that that’s a drawback, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a colourful sky, like a sunset stretched across the entire atmosphere, but I want to see the whole world go pitch-dark next time.
3) I need to get into photography. I’m fed up with the limitations of my on-board memory, and digital or film is just as good an alternative (if not better!). There’s no use complaining about how quickly details fade if I’m not going to do something about it.
I won’t feel as pessimistic tomorrow. Today was an amazing day, and I’m glad I lived it.
April is going to be a slow month for writing. I've lost momentum and have no time to regain it with exams mounting ahead. Plenty of ideas being written down for May though! Also, I learned about the blockquote html tag today! Very handy
We can now conclusively say that mind is not liquid, flowing to take the shape of its container, but cellular. At a certain limit, dependant on the neural density of the medium, a growing mind will fracture in two. This fracturing, also referenced as mitosis, can also be induced in a static state by dropping neural density rapidly if mind-safe conditions can be kept stable. It is the belief of this council that further research would be best directed towards hive configurations and away from compounding larger minds, as this property raises extreme danger for minds approaching their fracture limit.
The wind rushes down the boulevard, caressing the storefronts and the ornamented rooftops, filling the cracks between buildings and the metal frames of the streetlights. The pavement glistens with the evening’s rain, and reflects the strings of lights crossing back and forth from the lampposts. Lines of young partygoers soak up the first warm friday night of the year in front of the épicerie older than my grandparents. And above it all there’s the tiniest sliver of a moon newly reborn, a glowing papercut in the sky, watching closely.
Part of the beauty of a century is that it is written entirely in one moment, in one place. This moment, even the day before it, is captured and recorded alongside the words. Looking back at the centuries from months past I remember that mug of tea watching the cats play, crying at the dining table over sweet songs and sweeter memories, pacing the kitchen thinking of time passing, or realizing mid-conversation that I’ve got a great idea for tonight. So much of me is catalogued in these pages. The writer, the reader, the laur-to-soon-be, we all have a place here.
Inspired by and you'll miss it by snow!
A moment, or a collection of moments, is coming now that will have a lasting impact on every moment that comes after. Whether or not you are paying attention is irrelevant. This moment will change you regardless of if you know it’s coming. But if you do pay attention, you can hear a little bell ringing in the wind right before such a moment appears. If you do hear the bell, it won’t really change how the moment impacts you. What measure of control you have, compared to the power of the wind that rings, is so insignificant that its notice means your chance has long since passed.
It means something to be able to watch the moment approach, though. To close your eyes and feel its waves crash over and through you, leaving its imprint on every cell of your body. The bell is a kindness, a messenger, an acknowledgement that you do have, if not a voice, at least eyes and ears towards what is transpiring. But again, whether or not you are paying attention is irrelevant. Keep an ear open only if you wish.
Exam season is kicking my ass this year, but I think I'm through. Commenting on this publically will keep me accountable; i hope i can hit every day left in april. How did I do this in december?
The range of prostheses and augments the human body could take to was impressive. Clara had seen it herself- it doesn’t take more than a few months for even an adult to get fully accustomed to an extra artificial limb, let alone a replacement. Vision is different though. Eyes are complicated structures, she had been taught, and your brain pulls numerous little tricks to produce your normal array of vision. Every eye is wildly different physically, and your brain has to know how to interpreting your particular vision- there’s no one-size-fits-all sensory organ. Replacement eyes- ones that measure and record the same three wavelengths as biological ones- rarely take, to say nothing of those meant to see past the visual spectrum.
Clara had been lucky then, maybe, to suffer her accident as young as she did. The brain is flexible, especially at such a young age. And somehow her brain had rewired itself to accept this new eye, brought in to replace the one she lost. And not just a standard replacement eye- there had been a lucky find a few decades before she was born, and someone dug out a old mass-produced wide-frequency artificial organ. With no knowing if there’d ever be another situation where someone in the valley could make use of it, they decided to give it to her. And it worked.
Without whatever treatments had meant to accompany her prostheses, her synapses had long since solidified, and she was stuck with the same settings the eye was first tuned to. Some infrared, two wavelengths of ultraviolet, and some blanket full-spectrum black-and-white vision. It didn't work quite the way people always assumed it did. This organ can only be read in the same language that her other speaks, and while the brain does its best to fill in the gaps something is always lost, or changed, in translation. The finer details on synthetic vision had been lost long ago, and now there was no one left who could properly quantify her experiences. And worse, there was no one to share the views with. So, she came up the mountain alone.
I’ve been blessed with numerous opportunities to study my personal apex predator up close. I’m obsessed with her details. There’s a soft gradient of fur density where her pink nose fades into her face, hairs increasing smoothly upwards. She’s got gorgeous speckled yellow-green eyes. The occasional white hairs mixed in with the black coat on her back. The spurs on her tongue. You can see how her whiskers extend like a bubble around her face, covering every angle. How the slight shadows in her white fur contour her lean muscles underneath. Her tiny adorable razor-sharp teeth. She’s beautiful. She’s perfect.
Multiples of 25 used to be a big deal when I was working towards a century, but I didn't have the energy to be introspective tonight. I noticed though! 5 quarters century!