DESTROYING TO SELF SOOTHE

I'm crowded by your absence

WHAT KIND OF HEAVEN WOULD IT BE IF I CAN’T TAKE YOU

When it feels scary to jump, that’s exactly when you should jump. Otherwise, you end up staying in the same place your whole life. It’s something I remind myself of every time I feel uncomfortable or stagnant, which are feelings that have been lingering recently.

I need a change of job, a change of scenery, and a change of self. Time to jump.

Looking at my habits—are they the product of innumerable little cowardice and lazinesses or of courage and inventive reason? I bear the wounds of all the battles that I avoided.

A DIMENSION NOT ONLY OF SIGHT AND SOUND BUT OF MIND

Twenty-twenty-five marks the 28th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights, a series of unidentified flying objects observed in the skies over Arizona and Nevada in the spring of 1997.

Between the hours of 7:30 PM and 10:30 PM on March 13th, lights of varying descriptions were reported by thousands of concerned onlookers from southern Nevada, Phoenix, and Tucson, 300 miles south.

Some witnesses described seeing what appeared to be a vast “carpenter's square-shaped” UFO containing 5 spherical lights. Two different events occurred during this incident: a triangular formation of lights seen moving over the state and a series of stationary lights observed in the Phoenix area.

At approximately 7:55 pm, a witness in Henderson, Nevada, reported seeing a large, V-shaped object traveling southeast. At 8:15 pm, an unidentified former police officer in Paulden, a small town near Prescott, reported seeing a cluster of reddish-orange lights disappear over the southern horizon. Shortly afterward, there were reports of lights seen over Prescott Valley. Tim Ley and his wife Bobbi, his son Hal, and his grandson Damien first saw the lights when they were about 65 miles away from them. At first, the lights appeared to them as five separate and distinct lights in an arc shape, as if they were on top of a balloon, but they soon realized that the lights appeared to be moving towards them. Over the next ten minutes, the lights appeared to come closer, the distance between them increasing, until they took on the shape of an upside-down V. Eventually, when the lights appeared to be a couple of miles away, the family said they could make out a shape that looked like a 60-degree carpenter's square, with the five lights set into it, with one at the front and two on each side.

Soon, the object with the embedded lights appeared to be moving toward them, about 100 to 150 feet above them, creeping slowly across the sky and hovering silently, passing over their heads and maneuvering through a V opening in the jagged heights of Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountains, toward the direction of Sky Harbor International Airport. Between 8:30 and 8:45 pm, witnesses in Glendale witnessed the light formation pass overhead at an altitude high enough to become obscured by the thin clouds. Amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley in Scottsdale also observed the high-altitude lights "flying in formation" through a telescope.

At approximately 10:00 p.m. that same evening, several people in the Phoenix area reported seeing "a row of brilliant lights hovering, or slowly falling, in the sky." Onlookers took photographs and videos, many of which still exist, prompting author (and noted UFO skeptic) Robert Sheaffer to describe the event as "perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history."

Whether it was a “military training exercise” or a Phoenix extraterrestrial visit, we all were together to witness it. What a time to be alive. Where are these phenomena in our current digital age? Have our minds made advancement in comprehension or is the intelligent beings avoiding our increasingly digital world? I would like to believe we aren’t alone in this universe, but it’s starting to look like we are.

YOUR FLESH WILL EMBARRASS YOU

March is my earthly return. I’ve spent the last six months living in a perpetual state of fantasy, a daydream, where every emotion was felt overwhelmingly—everything raw, everything sensitive. I’ve been returned to normal; indifference is commonplace once again, where nothing is the end of the world. Most of my time has been spent worrying about nothing in particular. I’m not reading enough. I’m not writing enough. But I’m experiencing happiness nonetheless.

There is joy to be found in everything, everywhere. Feeling everything—all at the same time. I don’t shy away from sadness or pain. I allow myself to feel and meditate on it, trying so hard to understand the what, the why, and the how. But maybe I was never meant to understand—only to witness, only to experience, only to kneel in the sand of the summer desert and feel my own heartbeat echoing the first sound ever made. Learning to listen. Learning. Undoing. March is a rebirth of self. I don’t wish to mourn my old self but feel gratitude for the ability to evolve into a new me. Spring is here. Spring has sprung. And maybe I have, too.

IT COULD BE FOREVER OR IT MIGHT BE TODAY

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