Once upon a time, there was no world at all; there were just boxes and boxes of people under the sky, waiting to be opened. None of them knew each other. None of them really cared. One day they felt a great trembling in the air, so they crawled out of each box and went their separate ways. Some went east and some went west. Some went south and some went north. Some began to cry or laugh for no reason at all. Many fought with each other—over land, over food, over women. A few found love and prospered. Still, some missed their simple life inside the boxes, so they spent the rest of their breathing moments searching for their long, lost homes. When they realized their boxes would never be found, all they could do was curl up and die. And this is the way the world has been ever since.
Those who left their boxes became the wanderers and inherited the In-Between, piling road maps into vans and motor homes, guiding their lives across rest stops and road signs. Their children learned about the world by looking out windows and watching tree tops and birds and telephone poles fly by—blurry, but somehow perfect. They questioned the mysteries of the universe as they peered into the night sky. A telescope gave clarity, but no answers. They watched the solar eclipse for the first time, with its black round hole lit behind by glorious rays and concluded it looks somewhat like a dark, watchful eye.
Eventually some wanderers settled down, gathering in pews or around dinner tables. Their lives were written in windowsill words, thousands of pages written in silence. To the wandering settlers, writing words from the windowsill came just as naturally as bottling up shadows, and this is what many of them did. Some of them broke away and manufactured love, over and over again until it became mechanical pulp, robotic kisses on top of the dog’s head. They wrote the dark poetry, the wrenching back-alley murders. They dug deep within their souls and pulled out balls of grime and wadded hair, dreamed of killing, of avenging blood and tears. They rode the streets on rotting bicycles, crashing into the corners of the world, dreaming of an escape. Dreaming once again of the boxes their ancestors spoke of—the comforting encapsulation. Their pain was channeled into working, so they built more sky-scratchers and spread their wealth into rivers of concrete, glistening with glitter that once came from stars.
