under the moon
One night, I threw a glance out of my window, and saw my father sitting in a deck chair down at the canal. The full moon illuminated the shingle roofs of the dirty old town that seemed now to be surrounded by jungle, the nightbirds sung, and flies squirted through our untidy kitchen. The view emitted a coziness that captivated me, and a deep feeling of peace, rest and gratitude flew through me body and mind like the calm wind that blew through the leafs of the tall velvet-grey trees outside. As I stood there, the clouds slowly began to dwindle - the moon became bright and started to glow; its light began to glare over its border, and the world fell silent as it grew into a column that seized through the sky down to earth, just as a sunset does through the ocean. It swallowed the town, the canal, and my father along with his chair - no trace of them was visible anymore, and only a smoke filled trench that ran from horizon to horizon remained. I stood there in shock, and when the voice of a friend whispered to me that my father was dead, I was sure it was merely a terrible dream; and indeed I woke up, but the trench beneath me was still there, filled with a vanishing swaths of grey smoke. Nobody could explain to me what had happened; the experts on the news and the discussions of the internet did only speculate upon the effects that the fall of the moon would have on the environment, the earths atmosphere and rotation, and space travel - but nobody seemed to know or care about my father who was sitting there were it came down, and even if I hadn't been too confused and exhausted to tell them - what would it have helped? Struck with terror I saw the pictures and movie clips that were repeated and printed over and over, showing the wondrous natural phenomenon from different angles, in different saturation, manipulated with graphical effects and sometimes accompanied by music - it felt like a anonymous, unknown digital grave for him, and I realized that many things that I'd seen in the past must had been such graves for other people, forever unknown to me. A strong wrath rose up in me - unable to accept the state of the world, a general public that failed to recognize the human gravitas behind the things that were or were not in their focus, and my impotence in regard to both - I jumped up, and decided to tell the friend that made me aware of my fathers dead that I wouldn't accept it. As I woke up once again, the moon was still hanging at his place in the sky.