Soft Breaks

"Soft breaks"

I'm not saying that it was an actual moon. I wouldn't want to make any
such lofty claims for it, so far as I know something is only a moon if
it goes around and around something.

This one wasn't, it was more bobbing. Like a winecork slipped into the
sink while you're washing up, just gently up and down. They like the
water, they always seem to roll that way if you don't watch them.

The moon that came to sit in my meadow, she was not so big, maybe the
size of a boulder, 'cept, not grey, and smoother, not lumpy and hard.
She sat up there, in the large sky of the evening, about thirty feet or
so off of the ground, just bobbing up and down, all peaceful and
charming.

The grass is too long in the meadow, but I like it that way. There seem
to be flowers growing among it where I look and now the cows are all
sold, it is safe to throw down my blanket anywhere and just lie back
and let the whole sky fall at me, till my head turns to spinning. The
field smells like a bed, or is it just that the liquid I add to the
washing machine pretends to be meadows? Everything's out to fool folks
these days. Sooner or later, you'll walk into a pine wood and think it
smells like the christmas tree airfreshner hanging up inside your car.
It's hard to get fixed in your head how PEOPLE actually smell. You
never smell humans anymore, just what they want to pretend they smell
of. We never smelled of musk, or lillies, or coriander or whatever. We
smelled different to that, but it's hard to know anymore what that
smell was.

Isn't it funny how things stick in your head like grit getting in your
eye and no matter how hard you blink, you still feel its there much,
much later ? For me, when I looked up at my little fat moon, it was
Romeo and Juliet "But soft, what light from yonder window
breaks?"

I'm sure that for folks who know something about Shakespeare, that
isn't one of his better lines, but I like it. It's up to me what I
like, isn't it? Until I'd read that, I'd never thought of light being
something that could be soft, or hard, or anything. Just light, or
dark. When you think about it, you realise the light's always changing,
and yet you can't see it. You can't catch it in a jar, no matter what
that song says about moonbeams.

See, as well as the oddness of it being there at all, it was the light
it threw off was the oddest thing. It wasn't all silver like fishes,
the way the moon normally is, this was more like butter. And it felt
that way too. When I walked underneath it, I could feel myself moving
through the light, like the thin greasy coat of butter comes into your
fingers when you're rubbing in, mixing the flour and knobs of butter
together. There was something there, some resistance in the light, but
not much. When you move in air, there's nothing, when you move through
water it's like moving heavy velvet drapes, but the light from the pet
moon was more like moving a net curtain just a little to see
outside.

My moon isn't messed up like the one other people have, none of those
craters and holes. She's smooth and soft and shiny, a moon you'd hug,
if you could just get a bigger ladder.

If Henry had still been alive, he'd have wanted me to call somebody.
Come and have a look at our moon in the meadow, he'd have said, using
the telephone to ring up people he barely knew. I don't care for
telephones, not since I heard how they work. Little bits of grit in the
earpiece, dancing up and down as the electricity goes through them. It
ain't natural. They don't send the words down those wires, just signals
that make the grit jump to pretend the same sounds.

I'm the same with records. Tapes I don't mind, CDs I don't mind,
because I can pretend the sound is really there, locked into them. But
records, you pick them up and you can see there's no real music in
there, just ridges that pretend to be trumpets and drums. Ella
Fitzgerald wasn't in those records, it was just bumps that sounded the
same way if you rubbed them up right.

We're better off without the telephone, and maybe without Henry too,
though it took me long enough to see it that way.

How many people have their own moon to sit underneath and eat small
soft apples in its warming light?