In Spirit

Once a year, the restless that have scratched at the barren walls of the fourth floor for months without stopping to breathe rush upstate and bask in the splendor of nature under a usually somewhat sunny sky. Picnic blankets litter the ground and suffocate the grass, but meanwhile kids are skipping around the lake, slapping a rubber ball with their foot as hard as possible, and climbing to the top of the mountain for a spectacular view. This is our Spirit Day. We bring lunch, we bring a camera, we bring a dollar for the ice cream, and not much else. We leave the weight of the physics exam behind between the concrete monsters of the city.

This year I'll be hiking that road with R and K3, intent upon reaching that blissful everything at the top. Colors will swirl beneath me like the work of a drug, toxic and mellifluous, beckoning me into their wake. If I can see the whole world, I can make sense of it and catalog it, stick it deep in a drawer and forget until reorganization. I can focus on the brightness in front of me. I can focus on the orb of promise held between the teeth of the god of the sun.