The beetle with a big heart.

The air was cold, and dark, and silent as I snaked my way down city streets, disappointingly empty for the hour and my enthusiasm. Now waning. The car's headlights cut a bright swath through the bible-black moonless night, pushing ever onward in an infinite figure-8 around the sleepy town. Nothing moved save the deer and raccoon, and the occasional fox.

Out of the silence scratched a familiar static, and the words I could make out stopped me, the car, the wildlife, and even the wind in the tree tops, so that all was still in some kind of empathetic hush. The way the world resolves into itself just before a storm breaks, as if searching for the inner strength to weather what's ahead. The static ended and all of the blood in my body rushed to my face, burning my cheeks and leaving the rest of me cold and angry.

What kind of a treason had just occurred and for what?

A two-second lapse in the span of silence and it left me with no answers, just a red-hot anger and a torturous mountain of questions. And in the next second, God in His omnipresence took pity on my absolutely stupid predicament and put the most apt song He could conjure up, on the channel I had randomly tuned in. Foot to pedal I resumed my figure-8, rolled up the windows, and turned the volume as loud as I could afford and still be able to hear the static, should it call me.

I have to admit that there was a moment, perhaps as long as a heartbeat, perhaps as short as the space between, where I wondered if it was some kind of a communication, the static. A sign that only I could understand, to tell me that I am really not as alone, or isolated as I sometimes believe. I ran down all of the possible ramifications of such a choice on his part, and the decision I came to when I reached the end of the rabbit hole was that I didn't care.

A Hand came down and lifted a Jurgis amount of weight off my chest. I realized that there is no way that one can rationalize all of the events of a lifetime, and that perhaps even if one could, it would be a Pyrrhic victory over personal history, at best. We stumble, we falter, we get up and dust ourselves off, and we carry on.

The expanse of silence that encapsulated the night was broken every now and then with more static, and from the far reaches of the northern shore I was able to gain a perspective that, previously, I had not. It was almost foolish, really. The tripping and the ego and the pomp and the sense of ownership. I watched the lights of a freighter drift slowly from west to east, as it sliced the horizon in half on its way. The lake wind brushed my cheeks as it went from one window to the next and in a moment of divine clarity I felt unowned, and with no possessions in tow. Sometimes the simplicity of life is so beautiful that it crushes me.

I sat for some time and watched the eastern sky alight with reds and purples and magentas as the world came back to life. Rostropovich filled the car with music, and when I answered the call it was a friend just to the west, who was keeping watch over the rising sun in the exact same way as I. We talked, and laughed, and made plans as our wards began their commutes around us.

And when I got home the thought right before I fell asleep was from Marcus Aurelius, that Things have no hold on the soul. Onward, upward.