An eclipse was once thought of as a harbinger of doom. Primitive cultures, at least slightly more primitive than our own, would look up into the sky with dread as the sun was stolen from them. Some cultures would offer blood sacrifices, or fall on their knees in mass supplication until the sun once again peeked from the edge of the offending shadow.
Generally speaking, we don’t do any of this anymore.
But we do stop and stare.
There was a partial eclipse in 2001. I was in the middle of the city centre on the day, doing my usual rounds of the second-hand bookstores that had replaced my previous pilgrimage around the video stores of the decade before. As it turned out I was standing outside of Worcester’s Market Hall as it happened and I slowly walked along the street towards home, watching those around me as much as I watched the eclipse.
I was self-conscious as I walked, I was the only moving figure. Almost every face was turned upward, and I thought of all the times I had been told never to look into the sun. I felt for a moment like a character in a movie. A stranger in a stranger town, a wanderer unaware of some local custom that would mark him as an outsider.
No eyes moved to me, and no pointed fingers marked me to chase, but I understood the power that this celestial occurrence had over us, and I understood that this power had not decreased, merely changed. It was then that I realised that change and doom were the same thing, separated only by our reaction to it, and our fears of its outcome.
I did not know it at the time, but someone else watched that eclipse. She was working in the one bookstore I did not visit that day, distracted as I was by that celestial shift that occurred so far above us all. We passed by each other by mere feet, and would not meet for another year, but after that, we would never be apart again.
I think of this often.
There have been many eclipses since, but I don’t remember any of them as vividly as I do the one on that day. Nothing else special marks that day, apart from the knowledge of a chance meeting that never occurred. What might have been a lost chance became a postponement, and I cannot help but think of fate.
I think there is magic in the world we too often mistake for the commonplace. This magic is both light and dark and is as unpredictable and unlikely as a politician uttering the unvarnished truth. Most of us would deny this in the cold light of day of course, but we all know it exists when we wake in the dead of night remembering the frayed edges of some unsettling dream.
And what is magic if it does not change?
A year after the eclipse I met the person I’d spend the rest of my life with, and I knew this fact instantly, as if recognising one of life’s basic truths.
Of course, whether this will ultimately be change or doom is yet to be seen.
But I’d put my bet on change.
But where there is light magic there must be dark, and fate – if there is such a thing – must balance them out.
I was working for a small store, in the very same Market Hall where I met her ten years before when I fell ill. My skin took a yellowish tinge and the whites of my eyes took on a decidedly green hue. Food would not remain in my stomach and the weight I carried diminished as if being drawn out by a fat-eating vampire.
Eventually, a doctor was consulted, and I was sent straight to a hospital ward.
Do not pass “Go”, do not collect $200.
My liver had failed, and within a week I could not easily visit the bathroom by myself. I was scanned and examined, and a cocktail of pills was prescribed. A cupful of rainbow drops, of varying sizes, was presented to me twice a day, but the weight continued to disappear, and my skin began to present as green. I became the world’s worst Hulk impersonator, the Hulk without the bulk, and the eyes of the doctors began to avoid my own.
A list of questions was presented to me. Each was a little more invasive than the last, and I knew they were at a loss to understand my illness. No, I do not smoke, I told them. No, never had any dabbling in drugs. I do not drink to excess, no, and I have not been abroad recently.
Their words became harsher, their assumptions brusquer. I saw disbelief in their eyes at my replies. There must be something, they would tell me, and then list the usual causes as if my replies were lies.
They were not lies.
Weeks went by like this, between family visits the vampires came in for their blood and the mad scientists wheeled me out for their tests. At its peak, I was losing three pounds of weight a day and for the first time, I was thankful for that spare tyre that I could never manage to shift.
Then came the day of the second biggest change of my life.
If this new batch of medication does not work, I’m not sure what we can do, the doctor told me, and the implication in his words was clear. His usual smile was gone, and I began to get visits from student nurses who spoke in recognisable words but undecipherable sentences.
I did not need to understand the words to know their meaning.
They had no idea.
Another cocktail was administered, then another, but the weight continued to evaporate, and my feet no longer met the ward floor. Feeding myself was almost impossible, but that was fine because I no longer ate.
I was not well.
It was early one morning that the words popped into my head. I was listening to the moans of pain from somewhere on the ward, trying to block them out by listening to cartoons on the hospital TV network.
You’re dying.
That’s what I thought, and as soon as I thought it, I knew it was probably true.
But then something happened that I could not have anticipated. Where I would expect to feel fear, there was contentment. I could not understand it, but the feeling that things were exactly as they should be was strong, and I looked at my failing body with a curious detachment and another thing popped into my head. It appeared without any preamble, or any consideration of its meaning.
It’s going to be an adventure.
That was the exact phrase that I woke up thinking the next morning.
The exact phrase.
It’s going to be an adventure.
I do not remember dreaming the night before, and I doubt the animation of the cartoon network had encouraged such a thought. It was as if some kindly nurse had dropped the fully formed idea into my mind in the moments before my awakening. The phrase was there, complete, and I knew exactly what it was referring to.
I’m dying, and it’s going to be an adventure.
The next few days were little more than a string of moments to me. I watched the foliage outside the ward’s windows, the sun streaming through them, and the sound of chatter from nurses and family, but that phrase ran through my mind. I was distracted by it, pleasantly confused by why it had appeared to me at what should have been my darkest moments.
I did not know it, but I had passed the worst.
I started to gain weight as I pondered those nine words over and over.
I’m dying, and it’s going to be an adventure.
Even as I was well enough to be discharged and I began a long convalescence at home the phrase swam around my mind. Even as I became well enough to return to work and put the unpleasant experience behind me those words still wandered around my consciousness, and even now – to this day – I wonder where they came from and exactly what they meant.
Though, perhaps oddly, I never doubted them, and I still believe it’s going to be an adventure.