It came off with some resistance, the way tape does when it is attached to flesh, but not so much that it would have caused her pain. And so I leaned forward and gently pulled it back from her mouth. I could tell that she was desperate to get the tape off her mouth, but for some reason could not do so on her own. I’d have said I was looking at the face of God if it wasn’t the face of a girl. It was as if the rest of my life had been a vision, and she alone was real. I knew that what I was looking at was the face behind every experience I’d ever had. Was she? I asked myself that question repeatedly later on, but the answer was always no. But if I did that you might still imagine her as a vision. The glow of her face, which seemed lit by something like candlelight, although the room was completely dark. I can tell you to the last particular what her hair and face and eyes looked like-the shape of her mouth and her nose. Over her mouth someone had placed an X of black electrical tape. Her eyes were hazel, her auburn hair cut short. Her face was pale and moonlike, with a few freckles around her nose. There beside me was a girl of about seventeen years old. I felt a presence directly to my left and opened my eyes. It was the state one sometimes experiences in those hard-to-describe in-between stages of sleep, except that I was awake.Īfter about forty-five minutes like this, my breath caught in my throat because someone was there I hadn’t seen coming. I quickly entered a place of such quiet that I cannot remember having any thoughts at all-or at least a state in which the thoughts are so few that you can see them coming, like the traveler you witness crossing on an open plain on foot whose approach is visible from a long way off. In the darkness, who can tell the living from the dead? In the dark every voice could be the voice of an ancestor or a spirit guide. Maybe it comes from having spent so much time in the dark. Some people would be frightened at such a thing, but I never was. I’d have loved to walk, but I’d heard the voice before-spoken softly, but clearly, in some innermost room of the mind. The night was unusually beautiful, the weather just this side of cool. Remain calm-and very, very still.” This I did, positioning myself lengthwise on the couch beside the downstairs window, looking out on the moon, the darkness, and the stars. “I was about to leave the house for my walk when I felt the weight of a hand on my shoulder and a voice said, “Don’t go out tonight. In the early hours of JOur Lady first appeared in Woodstock, NY.īelow is an excerpt from Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand
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