Have you ever looked up into the sky at night, and it seemed that you could see beyond the stars? How many times have you looked up, but how few do you actually remember? I remember two times:
The sky seemed to roll, the stars flickering in the humidity of the late-August evening. It makes your throat feel dry and your body strained. Staring up, “We can’t see stars like this at home”, we said to each other. Lying on the concrete slab behind the garage, and at one time standing, we kept on watching – the factory near of my hometown humming, passing cars on the nearby highway sizzling in the distance.
…Or when we were in the onsen town in the mountains – there was nowhere to walk to at night, but we trudged through the snow so I could take photos, our shoes soaked and our feet freezing. You could see your breath in the air. You can’t hear snow fall. We opened the wooden sliding door and walked back into the warmth of the light.
The next day we looked out, all the leaves were brown in the freezing November, and the stars were hidden. The blue river was ahead and down the hill, and we didn’t even think about what was or wasn’t above from the night before, past the stars now hidden by the sun.
When looking up, the least important thing is what you see – or that there is even anything in space, beyond the blackness. The beauty and the demons share the space where we are already.
– Will Long, 2016
CD available on or around December 1, 2016