The Child, In the Car, A Snowy Night...

You are small. Someone else is driving. it slowly becomes immaterial whether you are happy or unhappy; whether they are kind or aware of you or not.

Possibly there are siblings asleep beside you, their elbows poking into your side;

or you are cradling one of them who was particularly crabby til they finally passed out.

You might not be that comfortable, but all is in movement. There is no relevance of time, just this moment, of the car moving in the darkness.

You are a kid, and who knows how long this will last, the night, the muffled sound of the car in the snow, the adults quiet in the front seat, the siblings piled about you.

You lean your head on the door of the car. it's vibrating and bumping you about now and then, and you sleepily gaze up into the snow, which is churning down toward you.

It is churning, and although it is everywhere, and you have this awareness, it seems it is only where the light illuminates it, from the car lights. Now and then another car passes, and the universe of the snow's existence is momentarily enlarged...and then shrinks to just that scope of what you can see before you. And the snow , you know, must be falling everywhere, but it truly appears to simply be swarming toward you...just you and noone else, in a torrent of white movement, thousands or millions of snowflakes pouring in a flood, and in waves, and undulations as the wind and the car's movement ebb and flow. and the experience is hypnotizing.

But more than that, like a moment caught in time, where nothing else in your life exists. And no one else exists-  the dreaded school mornings, the disappointed parental faces, the struggling neighbor, the groups of kids as they  turn from you  on the playground...the stultifying upstairs hall you pass through on the way to the bedroom that fits you like someone else's life...

The thing that comes closest to this moment of clear simplicity is when it is late at night, everyone is asleep in the house, and you climb out of bed, careful to wake none of your siblings, open the window, and lean out into the darkness, watching the same snow irrevocably falling as you stand and breathe in that moment.