I stepped through the double-glass doors and into the cool twilight. With a subtle shrug of my shoulders I let fall to the ground the burdens and pressures of a busy day at the office. I walked slowly but deliberately across the nearly empty parking lot to my car. I did not hurry; I did not tarry.
Before I opened the door, I glanced skyward. Night was rapidly overcoming the evening, leaving behind a faded orange wash as the only proof that the sun had shone recently. I saw not a single cloud in the vast expanse of sky…only two short jet contrails and a thumbnail sliver of a crescent moon. I don’t pay enough attention to her monthly cycles to know whether she was coming or going, only that she was there.
I climbed into my car and began the forty-minute commute that would take me home. Along the way I had an epiphany: I should write near the end of each day as a form of decompression. I used to have a blog. I used to write everyday. Why not start it up again? I knew that I did not want to get caught up in designing the blog. I didn’t want to spend days thinking up a clever name verses actually writing. I had a concept: decompression. What are those decompression chambers called? Hyperbolic chambers? No. Hyperbaric. But…I like the word “hyperbolic”. I’d used it once in the title of a short fiction piece. And I’m prone to exaggeration, so hyperbolic seemed appropriate. Witness: the birth of the Hyperbolic Chamber.
And so, I decompress. I exaggerate. I write. Already, I feel as though I am emerging from a chrysalis. I am a new creature with hints of the old. I have always been a writer, but I rarely unfurled my wings and took flight. But like every other rare time I took to the air, I feel the thrill flying. I rise high on the updrafts and dive low to the ground pulling up at the last possible moment to soar on the thermals and jet-streams of imagination and thought.
Now is the time for new words, new thoughts, new hyperbole. Today I have simultaneously entered the decompression chamber while emerging from the chrysalis.
