Follow the Light

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Written in February 2007.

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I wake up to a grey morning.  Beyond my bedroom window, a smoggy cityscape freezes as wintry winds hit.  The room is airless and cold, dark still even though the curtain of night has lifted.  I stand at my window and stare out.  A cloak of clouds hangs over the city.  In a flash, I see a bright light.  It is a light that swiftly sweeps across this bleak cityscape, and as I look at it, everything is changed...

“Wakey, wakey,” I heard Mum’s voice calling from the front as the car crawled up an unusually dark road.  I lay drowsy in the back, slowly rising from a shallow slumber.  Wiping my eyes, I began to see the darkness which folded ahead of us.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Mum, Dad and I were on our way up a strange and steep road, blindly crawling up and up.  It had not been many days since we were back in the apartment, packing our little luggage, filling it up with clothes and clothes and clothes...  “We need that much, Dad?  We’re only going for a week,” my curiosity did not wait to ask.

“It will surely be colder up there,” Dad said, and though he seemed almost certain, I knew well he had never been up there either.

I had been most excited about this trip, for I did not often have the chance to leave the city.  As the car slithered up the crooked road, I sat in a wild, trembling anticipation.  Just as Dad had clearly foretold, the air was growing icy cold.  It left our windows hazy, and the wiper blades continued to scrape and scrape so the road could at least still be seen.  The headlights ahead pierced into the dying mist, like pin through paper, and I knew at last that it was nearly morning.

“Watch out!  Rabbit!” I cried.

The car took a swerve and swivelled to a sudden stop.  The noise of the engine abruptly died into a pulseless silence.

Mum hollered, “Are you all right?”

I felt my bones strained by the seatbelt, my feet knotted in the tight legroom.  In a common quietude returning, I unfastened it and went out through the door.

“Everyone OK?” asked Dad and he saw the rabbit as it hopped away in fright.  He closely examined the tires which had sunken into the dirt.

Numbness shot through my legs and bounded the seeping pain.  With my heart still pounding against my breastbone and with coldness hanging loosely in my throat, I began to hobble away from the car.  “Be careful, sweetheart,” Mum called from behind and waved her torch at me.  I slipped, picked myself up, and slipped again.  Suddenly, I stopped and found myself standing amidst tall trees, much isolated from Mum and Dad.  I looked back and saw the car.  It was gradually merging into the mist.

Then, as the shroud of darkness undraped, I realised I was standing on the mountain’s edge, staring into a distant ocean of fog.  Rising from the unknown were many mountain peaks of various shapes, but I was high above them all.  I did not call my parents to come and see, knowing sooner or later they would.  Instead, I kept watching in awe.  I watched as a bright, morning light ripped through the dark horizon.  It was a piercing white light, burning away the ocean of fog and reaching into the depth of my mind.  As it did, patches of sunny and green valleys below were revealed...

Now, whenever I see a bright light in any morning, even though it has been so many years ago, the very memory resurfaces.  It is a light that often revisits me; one that often takes me back atop that mountain.  Even now, back in this stuffy apartment bedroom, in a city desperately suffocating and sombre, I think the mountain will always be there.  And when I catch a glimpse of this light, everything is changed...