First Light

First light, so I am told, is a ceremony held when an observatory dome is first opened, and the first star is visible through its telescope. Perhaps I'll get to see something like that one day. For now, I am enjoying Christmas lights. My friend showed me this small set and then told me that there are certain streets where I live where these will soon cover everything. What a shocking idea. This picture was taken through a window at night time. I never knew something so small could cause two people to laugh so much.

After my friend went to bed, I stayed up flipping the Christmas lights on and off, on and off, as could only someone seeing them for the first time. Then I started playing with the speed setting on the program, changing it from sweeps of one second to half a second, then to two seconds and back to one. After at least an hour of looking at these lights at different distances, angles, and speeds, I took the glasses off. The transcendent sounds were still playing in my head, only now there were these pin pricks of something in front of me. They were caused by the sounds but separate from them. I imagined more and more of them all around me and tried to picture them in configurations like a helix or a seemingly infinite binary tree. It took me great effort and lots of pacing to get calm as the tiny apparitions faded away. I was finally rewarded with peaceful sleep.