The Comets Decide: Chapter 6 - Asylum

Louis Biggs didn't want to think any more. At this point, with the sky paling and the birds chirping their tired evening songs, he just wanted his mind to close down. He was looking for an off switch to pull; a lever in his skull that turns everything black and sweeps everything downstream.

It felt as though the river of thought flowing from his consciousness was drowning any perspective he once had and his mind was gasping just to stay alive. Where once he had enjoyed control or at least the illusion of it, now its motions and currents seemed strange and threatening.

The images of his reflection darted this way and that, all disturbed and distorted under a torrent of menace; a shadow of the comets that were crowding his sky.

He found himself glaring at the patterns in a leaf, into its veins and intricacies; he came to imagine himself as a leaf - to flutter in the wind, extend from a tree, be eaten by bugs, absorb sunlight in the day and become dewy by night; to grow and be fed and to feed; to die in shortening days, fall from a branch and be driven by the wind; to coalesce with the dirt and break down into the soil that feeds the tree.

For a moment Louis knew what it was like to be a leaf.

But then he thought what idiocy it was to be a man becoming a leaf and the image shattered around him and he slipped under the surface of his rushing torrent.

He seized himself, curling his shoulders up to his ears and breathing out in a slow motion of defiance against chaotic thought. This time, he became the little deer he could see some distance away, tentatively grazing beside an artificial lake.

But being a deer carried too much stress - he constantly feared for his life and swivelled his head so much so often he got dizzy. Deer are fickle and run in panic, sprinting for a safety that never really exists.

"All right" he said to his hands; "I'll be your damn comet".

His head thrown back, he gazed into the sky; motionlessly careening through space, dipped in star dust like it was wet paint and propelled by inertia and attraction; his body at absolute zero degrees and disintegrating; he was more than just the dying remnant of an unborn star; he was destruction and creation and being in balance; lighting the void briefly and eternally; absolutely no criteria to satisfy, no observer to entertain - what is a 'good' comet, anyway? - like the leaf became soil, so the comet became life through death and Louis became light and plunged into darkness.

An hour passed and the sun fell. Louis Biggs woke from the doze and stood to walk home, turning to examine the flattened grasses where he had sat, propped up by a beech tree, whose trunk could have been carved for his back and head to slumber against. He could hear the brook at the bottom of the bank babbling and the occasional springtime cricket call.

For a moment he paused, then he sat down and listened until, once again, he fell asleep.