The Floating Essay, Untitled

This time, then another time, I think, and then it’ll be over, with that world too. Intimations of the end but one by one. I live in the mountains now. This is a real thing that is happening now; I would not lie about this to you. From the shed where I write this, I can see the mountains. I am not lying about this, this is the truth. The mountains: how romantic. It’s a wonder that we don’t burst into song, every time that we see them.

I have never lived in the mountains before, and this is not a planned thing that is happening. They look fake, by the way, the mountains do. They look like the scale railroad models that my dad used to build when I was a child; so hyper-real as to appear fake. You can climb up into them, though, if you want.

You can climb up into them, though, if you want, and I am not saying that I have actually done this, although maybe I have. If you care to climb into the mountains, at the end of the day, with the setting sun, then you can see the time when the sun hits a peak or a crag or the edge of the mountains. When the sun does this, when the sun chooses to do this, then the sun splinters. The light of it I mean.

The light of the sun splinters and breaks, and then you can look down, from your vantage point on the top of the mountains, and see down to the city below, which also looks fake from that height — only 1/20th in size, like a scale model. The real world which also looks fake. And the light hits the mountains and then breaks into fragments, and you can stare down at the people below, scampering around, like little children trying to catch all the pieces.