The Infinite Starr

When I drove past the black dog with black eyes standing at the corner I knew it was the sign that everything was going to be alright.

Which makes absolutely no sense.

The dog didn’t speak.

It didn’t move.

It didn’t lift one paw and point dramatically toward my future.

It simply stood there.

Black fur.

Black eyes.

Perfectly still at the edge of the road as though it had been waiting for my car specifically.

I slowed down.

The dog watched me pass.

I watched it disappear into the rearview mirror.

And somewhere beneath reason, beneath logic, beneath that irritating adult part of the brain that needs receipts and explanations for everything, something whispered:

There you are.

Not there it is.

There you are.

I kept driving.

Because what else are you supposed to do when a black dog standing at a corner feels more like a message than an animal?

Perhaps nothing.

Perhaps everything.

That is the problem with signs.

You never know whether the universe is speaking or whether you’ve simply become very good at listening to yourself.

There had been others.

The skunk came first.

It shimmered across the road one dark night while I was driving home.

Yes.

Shimmered.

Don’t ask me how a skunk shimmers.

It did.

The headlights caught the white stripe running down its back, and for several seconds the ridiculous little creature looked almost silver beneath the moonlight.

Of course skunks come out at night.

There was nothing unusual about it.

That is what reason said.

Then why did I remember it?

We pass thousands of ordinary things and forget nearly all of them.

Traffic lights.

Mailboxes.

Trees.

Strangers.

License plates.

Clouds.

But every once in a while something ordinary refuses to disappear.

The mind circles it.

Stores it.

Returns to it later.

Maybe the strange part isn’t that the skunk crossed the road.

Maybe the strange part is that something inside me decided to keep it.

Then came the rabbit.

A flash of movement through the grass.

It hopped just far enough into view for me to notice it.

Stopped.

Looked toward me.

Then vanished.

The entire encounter lasted seconds.

But there it went into the collection.

Skunk.

Rabbit.

Then dragonfly.

I was sitting at a stoplight when it appeared beside the window.

Blue-green wings catching sunlight.

Buzzing around a machine made of steel, glass, gasoline, and impatience.

Everyone else was waiting for the light to change.

The dragonfly didn’t seem particularly concerned with traffic laws.

It hovered.

Moved toward the windshield.

Disappeared.

The light turned green.

The person behind me honked.

Apparently the universe has very little patience.

I drove on.

Then the birds started watching.

At least that is what it felt like.

Doves lined the power wires.

Quiet.

Still.

Observing the morning from above.

Beside them sat pigeons gathered together like distant relatives who hadn’t received the memo about the dress code.

Doves always get the symbolism.

Peace.

Love.

Spirit.

Hope.

Pigeons get french fries in parking lots.

Yet there they sat together.

Sacred and ordinary.

White feathers beside gray.

Heaven beside the grocery store.

Maybe that was the point.

We spend our lives trying to separate the extraordinary from the mundane when perhaps they have always shared the same wire.

Then came the coyote.

Broad daylight.

Alone.

Running through an open field after something I couldn’t see.

That one made me stop.

Coyotes are supposed to belong to the edges.

Dusk.

Dawn.

Night.

Places beyond headlights.

Yet there it was beneath a bright sky, chasing something invisible through the grass without the slightest concern for where I believed coyotes were supposed to be.

I watched until it disappeared.

Something about it stayed with me.

Stop waiting for darkness to become what you already are.

I don’t know where the thought came from.

Maybe me.

Maybe somewhere else.

Does it matter?

Then there were butterflies.

Always butterflies.

They arrive like punctuation.

A comma when life needs a pause.

A period when something is finished.

Sometimes a question mark.

And occasionally something that feels suspiciously like an exclamation point.

Then numbers began appearing.

On receipts.

Clocks.

Screens.

Addresses.

Random places where numbers normally mean absolutely nothing.

Then 11:11.

Again.

And again.

And again.

You can explain repeating numbers easily enough.

The brain loves patterns.

Once you notice something, you begin noticing it everywhere.

There is science for that.

There is spirituality for it too.

Humans have spent thousands of years arguing about which explanation is correct.

Perhaps both sides are missing something.

Because whether the universe put the number there or my brain decided the number mattered, something still happened.

I looked.

Maybe that is all a sign has ever been designed to accomplish.

Not prediction.

Attention.

Look.

There.

Now here.

Pay attention.

Even the flies joined the conspiracy.

For days they buzzed around the house.

One.

Then another.

Then another.

Annoying little creatures appearing in windows, kitchens, hallways.

Then suddenly they were gone.

No grand exit.

No explanation.

Just absence.

Strange how absence can become its own presence.

You don’t notice silence until something stops making noise.

And then Friday arrived.

An average Friday.

Nothing cinematic.

Nothing particularly magical.

The world hadn’t stopped.

Bills still existed.

People were still irritating.

Emails still arrived.

Traffic still behaved like a punishment invented by someone with unresolved anger.

But something felt different.

Everywhere I looked there seemed to be another quiet instruction.

Pay attention.

The black dog.

The skunk.

The rabbit.

The dragonfly.

The doves.

The pigeons.

The coyote.

The butterflies.

The numbers.

The flies.

And somewhere among all of them, the rainbow.

Actually, two.

A double rainbow stretching across the sky.

Other cars kept moving.

People walked into stores.

Someone pushed a shopping cart across the parking lot.

Life continued beneath it as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

I stood there staring.

For a moment, it felt like nobody else could see it.

Of course they could.

Probably.

But sometimes something doesn’t have to belong exclusively to you to feel meant for you.

Maybe messages aren’t delivered privately.

Maybe they are scattered everywhere and become ours only when we notice them.

That thought followed me home.

They are all saying something.

Then another thought came.

Stranger than the first.

You planted them there.

That one bothered me.

How could I have planted something before knowing I would need to find it?

Unless planting wasn’t the right word.

Maybe remembering was.

Maybe there are moments in life when we leave markers for ourselves without realizing it.

Little pieces of meaning buried along the road.

Not supernatural breadcrumbs necessarily.

Memory.

Instinct.

Pattern.

Hope.

Things our conscious mind forgets while some deeper part keeps the map.

Then one day we begin finding them.

A dog.

A number.

A bird.

A rainbow.

A feeling.

And suddenly the ordinary world develops cracks.

Light slips through.

Nothing actually changes.

Yet everything does.

That is the dangerous thing about perception.

One minute you’re living an average life.

Wake up.

Work.

Drive.

Eat.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Then the planets align.

Not necessarily above you.

Inside you.

Something clicks into position.

Something you’ve been forcing finally stops resisting.

Something you’ve been carrying suddenly becomes too heavy to continue carrying.

And without warning, you understand that the world you have been trying so desperately to survive is not the only world available to you.

There is another one.

It has been sitting underneath this one the entire time.

I found myself standing in a field.

I don’t remember walking there.

Perhaps nobody walks into these places.

Perhaps they arrive when we finally stop running.

Flowers stretched farther than I could see.

Wildflowers.

Nothing manicured.

Nothing arranged.

Nothing asking permission to grow.

Purple.

Yellow.

White.

Blue.

The kind of field humans would immediately try to photograph because apparently we no longer trust ourselves to remember beautiful things.

But there was no phone in my hand.

No email.

No schedule.

No clock.

No obligation waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.

For once, the real world had been left behind.

Or perhaps this was the real world.

Maybe everything else had been the interruption.

I walked farther into the flowers.

Someone laughed behind me.

Then someone else.

People I loved were there.

Not everyone.

That mattered.

The field wasn’t crowded.

There were no acquaintances pretending to be friends.

No people demanding explanations.

No one measuring success.

No one keeping score.

Only the people who mattered.

They spoke breath into life.

Not advice.

Not criticism disguised as concern.

Breath.

The kind of words that make something inside you stand taller.

We laughed.

Someone began dancing.

So naturally everyone else joined.

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about adults dancing in a field when there is absolutely no music.

Maybe there was music.

Maybe we had simply stopped requiring speakers to hear it.

The flowers moved around our legs.

The sky stretched endlessly overhead.

And for once nobody was trying to get anywhere.

That was when I noticed the hand.

It was holding mine.

Warm.

Familiar.

I looked down.

Our fingers were intertwined.

I didn’t look up to see who it belonged to.

Some things lose their meaning when you name them too quickly.

So I just held on.

Maybe this is the becoming before the becoming.

That strange little territory nobody talks about.

The place between who you were and who you are going to be.

Not the before.

Not the after.

The middle.

The pause between inhale and exhale.

The second before someone says yes.

The silence after goodbye.

The moment your foot leaves one side but hasn’t landed on the other.

We hate that place.

Humans want certainty.

Are we staying or leaving?

Beginning or ending?

Together or apart?

Successful or failing?

This or that?

But life seems to happen mostly in between.

Between meeting and loving.

Between dreaming and doing.

Between losing and healing.

Between knowing and understanding.

Between here and there.

The in-between looks empty because nothing has been labeled yet.

But perhaps that is where everything is being made.

The first splash into warm water on a hot day.

That instant when your body hasn’t decided whether the water is warm or cold.

Then the mist touches your face.

Your skin cools.

You inhale.

And there it is.

Presence.

No yesterday.

No tomorrow.

Just water.

Air.

Sun.

Breath.

Someone’s hand in yours.

I thought about the black dog again.

Standing at the corner.

Waiting.

Maybe it wasn’t telling me everything was going to be alright.

Maybe that was never the message.

Maybe nothing outside us can promise that.

Life doesn’t work that way.

People leave.

Plans collapse.

Bodies age.

Dreams change.

Storms arrive without checking whether we’re prepared.

Everything being alright cannot mean nothing bad ever happens.

That would be a terrible promise.

Maybe alright means something else.

Maybe it means:

You will know what to do when you get there.

The skunk crossed.

The rabbit appeared.

The dragonfly hovered.

The doves watched.

The pigeons gathered.

The coyote ran.

The butterflies passed.

The numbers repeated.

The flies disappeared.

The rainbows stretched across the sky.

And the black dog waited at the corner.

None of them told me where to go.

None told me what would happen.

They only made me look.

And perhaps I had misunderstood signs my entire life.

We keep asking them to predict the future.

Tell me what happens next.

Tell me whether I should go.

Tell me who stays.

Tell me whether the dream works.

Tell me if everything will be alright.

But perhaps signs aren’t pointing toward the future at all.

Perhaps they’re pointing toward the person standing here now.

Look at her.

Look how far she came.

Look what survived.

Look what disappeared.

Look what remained.

Look at whose hand she is holding.

Look at the field growing where she expected ruins.

Maybe I planted every sign.

Not literally.

Not consciously.

But perhaps some future version of me scattered them backward through memory so I would recognize the road when I finally reached it.

Impossible.

Of course.

But so are half the things worth believing before they happen.

The field moved gently beneath the wind.

Someone laughed again.

The hand squeezed mine.

I looked toward the horizon.

Far in the distance, almost hidden among the flowers, something black stood perfectly still.

Four legs.

Black fur.

Black eyes.

Watching.

The dog.

I smiled.

This time I didn’t walk toward it.

I didn’t need another message.

Because suddenly I understood why it had been standing on the corner that morning.

The dog hadn’t been waiting to show me where I was going.

It had been waiting to see if I remembered where I had already been.

The flowers moved around my legs.

The mist touched my face.

Someone pulled me farther into the field.

And for once I didn’t ask what any of it meant.

I simply went.

Maybe that was the sign.