Lazy Letter: Northern Lights
Alright, you should know that I almost didn’t send this. Now I’m so excited that I feel like I must. I was outside, maybe for more than half an hour. It’s almost midnight. My hands are frozen; hard to hold on to the pen and write. We were watching Northern Lights.
Oh, they were amazing. I want to describe them, but I really can’t. I have no background reference, hard to find words. Everything is very different here. Very extreme. Unexpected. I have never seen things like this before. And every familiar thing I see just doesn’t follow the pattern that I know of. Sun, clouds, stars, rain and the wind.
The Northern Lights showed up. So vague and faint at first. Almost zero–you could barely see them. But they were wide open. So far, I’ve seen them a bunch of times already. I knew how they’d turn out by the end of the night. I didn’t know how marvelous they turned out to be. The show was getting started. I knocked on the door, the cabin’s door; Tamara had to see this. I knocked on the glass and ran back to the yard. I wanted to have a better view, and I couldn’t miss a second.
I was taking deep breaths, the air was cold. We waited. I kept my eyes on the sky, every side and every part of it. You never know where they come out of. My neck hurts a little bit.
On the right side, I saw them. A cloud of lights formed and started to move. They got stronger in less than a second, moved faster. And the colors were amazing. Shapeless shapes, the stories they drew in front of our eyes. Speechless, they were tripping. I didn’t breathe for more than three seconds, I couldn’t.
I’m pretty sure they’re still out there. Probably not as strong, they’re fading away. What we just witnessed was pure magic. How lucky to be able to see them?
We waited outside. We mixed coffee with the last drop of whiskey Yasaman brought us. It was windy and quite cold. We watched them fade away gradually, hoping they’d show up again. They never look the same, Alda said the other night. They never do.
They now look like sunrise, Tamara said, only green in the dark sky. A cloudy sunrise, sometimes even blue. The wind had stopped and the lights were sweeping away behind the mountains in the distance. They were headed to Gullkistan. Somewhere beyond the highlands, right at the back of our little cabin. They show was over, and they were leaving the scenery. I may never see them again.
I just checked the sky. They’re completely gone. This is what I do, by the way, on clear nights. I step out the studio, look up at the sky, wait for my eyes to get used to the darkness, and hope to see them twist and turn. It might take a few seconds to see them if they’re very faint. But now they’re gone. I’ll wait till morning. I will have to leave soon.
26.03.17, Laugarvatn, Iceland