White
Slipping into the white blanket of my mind, the deceptive protection. The moment before creation must have been so: a white nothing. Lies. Light. Noise. Layers laid to the thickness of white. The fullness of every shade in existence consumed in colorless death: white culmination of eternity. The light must be prism broken to let loose the kaleidoscope of its composition.
The last color in my remembrance was lost in a vision of loneliness. I stood atop a smooth pillar the shade of the Dakota Badlands, thin rays of the same extending in every direction. The paper-thin ray ledges connected infinite pillars the same design as my own holding a single figure on each. My eyes dwelt on the figure closest to me: one I loved. Unable to see my feet, I shuffled towards the ray connecting our pillars only to feel it crumble to dust beneath me. The span was infinite and hopeless; the scene faded into the glare.
Finally, there was no hunger, pain, or sensation of any kind. The veneer of stilled light penetrated further daily, touching my lungs and heart, making them forget the delights of air. Eternal snow swelled every orifice demanding consumption or release. My mind, already lost in limitless spans and willing host to this presence, could provide no hope or relief. A craving born; penknife smiling above my papier-mâché skin. Slashes to the whitekissing flesh, a release of trickling red. Reflexive actions pumping blood and consciousness to feed the awareness of prematurely realized death. Months since last live thought leaving only the desire to kill my body if only to destroy the icy grip.
The blade never ravaged my skin, but they locked me up just in case. Becoming someone that must have her shoelaces confiscated was too much reality for the buzzing in my brain. Life penetrated the fog with a scream demanding acknowledgement, yet submerged in the death sheet was the totality of pain that threatened hell for that life if listened to. With a glance upon my captors with their mascara-clotted eyes and watchful pens, the cry for freedom gained prominence even to the fear of the breaking. Do anything necessary just to wear shoes again and touch the snow falling outside. The last night at the hospital was the last night I had intended to be alive. Surviving let the first shade of hope cascade across my vision.
Every day began a new entry into some part of the spectrum of existence. Drawing pictures to illustrate the barriers held within. Telling my story again and again until finally even I began to hear it. Each word and line bringing me closer to the annihilation of the haze. Annihilation or forgetting? I clung to each new color as the lifeline it truly was. If I could retain the vision of form and outline there would be no possibility of glimpsing eternality any longer.
Two weeks of living bringing me to this moment. The therapist and I had spent the previous two hours sorting through patterns and frames, ink blots followed by still lifes to reveal my psychoses. Each picture was simple enough and expected enough with a scene set to tell its own story. Learn now the deception. I turned over the last picture only to feel a sudden plummeting within. The blank face of the card stared back with an absolute void that jerked my intestines. All the pieces I had dissected out of this scene suddenly present and words forever meaningless to describe. There seemed to be no passage of time between now and the moment I had touched my death. My mouth started forming the words before I saw them.
“There is a figure swallowed in a blanketing fog, walking. He can neither see nor feel his face, but he concentrates on moving his right foot before his left in a slow-stepping tread. If he could find memory outside the enveloping whiteness he would see the house he left behind him time ago. His dog. His rusting car and mailbox. Step. Step. He would also remember his once held intention to walk a couple minutes just to clear his head and breathe. Just a couple minutes. There was no room for intention here, or memory. There was no space for Time here.
“All that is left is the naked craving to move into the thick forgetting. A vague tincture of fear lingers in his throat. This vast death. This too being a mere transience to the encapsulating mist. After all, fear is only a temporary reaction to the encounter of one’s eternal reality. Nothing left but a stepping into oblivion.”
Her pen kept moving well after I had stopped talking, providing neat refractions for a neat diagnosis to my illness. I hoped I was ill and all was a delusion of my madness. But I dared not look again at the blank placard I had tossed from me to stop the telling. I could still feel the incessant step and moist embrace within, and only focusing on the brown of her downcast, flitting eyes pulled me to the confines of the room.
Again, weeks past, in another room. Coming through a tumult of color so furious it seemed the canvas could not withstand it. Women’s bodies twisted in artistic misogyny. Chaos. Fear. Somehow it is the space of this room that holds violence. The death blow after the harmless pummeling of the screaming halls outside. Four pristine panels hang almost indistinguishable from the surrounding white walls. I know and remember well the fullness I see creeping around the edges of the silent canvas. Yet I wait. As people continue to drift in only to leave so quickly, I fight the urge to follow them. These panels are painted with fear: the fear of anything possible. Sit here long enough and you will see the exact thing you long to avoid. You will see the outline of your soul with no lines or figures to distract this inevitability. Any writer will be familiar with this experience as the same as that which occurs with pen poised above an umblemished piece of paper. In the moment before touching the pen to the surface for the first stroke, there is something like a near death experience as the flashing pool of life expands without limit. It is all one can do to define and refine that glimpse with slices of ink, each mark covering the retreating vision. For this reason, people hurry from the room to the comforting arms of Dahli and Andy Warhol.
This whiteness will not be forgotten. The only defense is to refract it to its elements. This is why I sit and wait. This is why I write what I see. Every word plummets through the blank canvas, obliterating the uninterrupted nothing. The stepping continues on, but see the trees emerging from the mists.
B L U E
Caressing keys of black and white to a stream of music beneath my hands. At thirteen, the Moonlight offered a momentary entrance to the inscape of my life. Thick midnight, broken solely by a new moon, trickling through my fingers onto the cool of the keys. My choir teacher cried, and my parents glistened in vicarious pride. I sat alone before them, oblivious to the ripples beyond my closed eyes. None present could know where this would lead me.
This remembrance finds me standing before a statue seven years and a thousand miles distant. Lit internally, just as the night sky, stone figures embrace within a pillar of granite. Below them is a placard declaring, “No matter how closely the circumstances of life bring us, we remain unknown to each other.” They are partially released from the stone, yet hopelessly caught still. Arms touching and linking, but no one’s face to another’s. Each eye is closed; each face carved in want. One man buries his face in his arms obscuring the woman he embraces.
Isolation was no stranger to me. The workings of my subconscious produced a nightmare born from this acquaintance. Every color in the scene was a caricature of itself. A mercurious sky shot through with clouds racing hellishly. The green of the field blinding. Two bodies lay supine on the hillock, both obviously dead. I smelled the blood and wished my eyes open, yet I drew closer to the two instead. Hideously reanimated by stolen life after death, the woman pulled herself up; the man lay unmoving. As she stood, I saw the gash in her chest and knew it to be a work of her own hand. The man looked to have the same wound, and I understood that she had killed him as well, her love for him driving her to hate. He did not know her; no one knew her. Her web of hair and possessed eyes in blood-drained flesh. She screamed with a violence matching her death. “I wanted to be seen!”
Insight held her tongue for months, leaving me breathless in blank apathy. The vision of an inscape now full-formed faced me one night in a church. Incense creeping from pew to pew, wafting incarnate holiness. My body reflected the satiated stillness of the place, only my eyelids giving their quivering betrayal. The hushed calm seductive and lethal. A Sunday school tale brought to horrifying reality: Lit evanescently, no more than by a splash of stars and shots of lightning, my body hung between surfacing breath and peaceful surrender. The sea my placenta of death. Only perceiving a gentle swaying led my eyes to the pock-marked thrashing of the surface. Surrounded by a cacophony of waves, two feet stood solidly planted above. A hand I recognized penetrated the surface, reaching toward my suspended frame. What He asked was intolerable. Grasp, breathe, fight. No. Here is quiet. Here is rest.
The deeps found their hold on me the moment I discovered love grown cold. One took it upon himself to declare his loss of love. Two chose another and demanded my happiness regardless. I cared no longer to even think of surfacing again. Only vaguely could I distinguish the hand reaching for me still, pleading that I leave my grave. I closed my eyes, grasping instead the white shroud of forgetting. The angel of death wields beauty beyond imagination. A sheath of water falling, shade upon shade of shimmering twilight. Silent stream in a cascade of silk over hushed cliffs of stone.
To stay in such a place is impossible. The rest it offers is a phantom in the viscera of life. Such rest is only that of death, forcing one to either surrender to or fight the shades there.
I completed the details of my surrender with frightening precision. January 15. The Mississippi at midnight. I would fall beneath the water just as I had envisioned for months. The offering of His hand was completely forgotten if not despised.
I was startled to find myself breathing still two weeks later. Not only breathing but sitting in a room of weepy adults all grasping at the straws of their existence. Support group where I was looking for absolute solitude. Ever since the moment I had signed away my will to die, I had been prodded by countless people to be happy I had survived. I pushed each away with a smile that told them what they demanded to hear but held little truth. Yet they were not deterred. Each touch alone was frail, but the mass of them lured me slowly to the One reaching for me.
Again, I went to the church where I had seen myself submerged in death. Just as before, the silence pounded my body as the scene opened before me. Still walking in boundless night. Yet not alone. I first caught a glimpse of them in the now glassy waters at my feet. Stars as limitless as the sea that bore them. The limitation of despair is that only one thing may be seen at a time. My mistake had been forgetting the hint of light necessary for the existence of my night. A marriage of colors that must be forever true. Now it stood arrayed before me as it had always stood. My eyes opening to take it in.
Green
***
Mist breathing a newness of horror. Its first sighs swore beauty. A voluptuousness of silk and feather touched blue by a fading moon. The bird stretched the length of its neck, emitting the silent call of dreams. One gentle whisper to the cacophony of terror. With terrible precision, the creature suddenly sliced its throat with the edge of its beak, releasing a cascade of blood. I opened my eyes, gasping to the night.
***
This is the beginning. A night flashing britality across my surety. Pen and paper waiting. The fear caught the gasps racing to keep up with the running of my feet. Unable to shield my face from the reaching brambles and twigs for the panic that pushed me on. Ink catching the words I tried not to believe. And I heard his steps pacing mine in the shadows. One I loved. Pursuing not to defend but to destroy.
Collapsing in a fetal crush to the unyielding surface of the bed, I found regret waiting. Nothing could reverse the forfeiture of life. Once seduced by death, life looks a mere pacification to existence. Now in a place that would only accept the denial of what remained to me: my need for an end. My instinctual strategy was to hide in the room until they forced me out. Clinging white shards of nothingness. My solitary broke with the door opening, admitting not only a nurse but what appeared to be a roommate for me. I sat up, embarrassed to be caught in bed at such an hour. Embarrassed to be caught in this bed. The new woman looked at me and gave me her title: “I haven’t slept in fifteen days!” She waited expectantly. Finally, “What are you in for?” The nurse was methodically removing and searching each item in the woman’s three stuffed suitcases, setting aside the Noxema, the pajama drawstrings. The dangerous items. “Suicidal,” I told her, tasting the title for the first time. The woman turned from her intent business of placing all her allowed belongings on the shelves and bookcases. Silent for a moment, she studied my face, weighing my merit of such a title. Deciding, she broke into a grin of welcome.
The nurse left us, my roommate flittering around through room with some unaccounatable energy rush. Her face animated by the chaos that had kept her awake for two weeks now; her eyes glowing through the pale of her exhaustion. Suddenly, she notices the fallen corner of the drapes covering our window and scrambles atop a chair in her spiked red leather boots the next moment. Drunk from sleeplessness, she teeters dangerously while ranting about the whoresons running this place who didn’t realize we were all OCD and couldn’t handle shit like this. The outburst proves too much for her unstable balance, delivering her in a sprawl to the floor. We laughed until we wept.
Twelve hours later, I found myself a solid member in the place. As in any system, one must learn the language and the method before freedom may become possible: let it be known, group therapy is the key. The newcomer was still stoned and drooling slightly as he sat clumsily propped between Michael the Pedophile and Jennie the Clepto. The therapist continued the lecture, undaunted by his less than rapt audience. On the smudged whiteboard he had written the sentence volunteered by Bill, the shakily recovering alcoholic: “I can’t stop drinking.” I could see the therapist’s eyes bright with what was to come. Gripping the eraser with unnatural fervor, he erased “can’t” with one swipe. Very deliberately, looking pointedly over his shoulder at Bill, he then wrote in “can” in its place. He spun to face us with all the flourish of a man in a cape pulling the white rabbit from a hat. The only response was a magnificent and contrived snore from Alice in the corner.
In a brief respite between sessions, I stepped into my room, my shelter from the beginning. My roommate’s eyes fluttered open from her heavily drugged sleep. None of the laughter remained in them now. She reached out her emaciated hand in the darkness of the room and drew me, unwilling, to her bedside. Then, she told me her story. The failed attempts. Her mind and capabilities dying more with each try, but never able to finish it. The hospitals and the darkness. Life and death now equally removed in the infinite shadows. With one last effort, she gripped me closely and told me to either finish myself now or to leave the love of death forever. Her pale eyes unwavering for a moment, suddenly closing and her hand falling back upon the sheets.
Upon successful completion of the various rituals of the place, they gave me my shoes and told me I could leave. Lacing up my boots, I felt a tremulous touch on my shoulder; Alex with a parting gift. An offering to one going back to the outside. Sunset and mountain caught in the lurid blur of still wet watercolors. The brights and pastels of a child’s first paint set. The giver, near sixty and a permanent fixture of this place. With the gravity of a priest in benediction, he handed me the crinkled, soggy paper. His eyes never left my own as he gave me this piece of himself. The breath of angels unmistakable in the chaotic shadings; only tarnished refuse beyond these walls.
***
In the shadows, the bird’s offspring drink, unknowing of the mother’s sacrifice. Even as her life flutters from her breast, the pain in her eyes is submerged in deep calm. That they should live.
RED
A dream. Countless people strewn across a sun-leached field scavenged rapaciously among the rocks. There was a figure drawing their need at the center of the vision, impaled on two crossbeams. Those closest reached to his body and pulled flesh in fistful fragments. The blood flowed from him in rivulets throughout the gathering, each person scrambling for a taste. Desperation thickened the saturated air.
***
My first night and Victoria was streaking again. Two hundred pounds of woman running down sedated halls for the sheer joy of it. When they finally got the needle into her, she had roused all rousable and given those of us already awake a run for our money. Crazy. A safe term until I had occasion to meet her eyes my second night. I had found a piano, touching the keys at the very moment I had been planning to reach my death, the music pounding through my fingers and veins. My submerged soul found sudden breath filling every pore. Finally ending and sensing my solitude broken, I turned and found her eyes on mine. They were petrifying in clarity, undisturbed by any pretense or affectation. Fleeting or fixed: an irrelevant question. In that moment, that glance, the thread connecting our souls vibrated along the slowly fading music. Commonality, universality discovered. Not the beauty of ivory and string, but the contagion and attraction of a gasping heart.
Two months later in a chilly room of silent paintings. “The Slaughter of the Innocents” stood before me, engraved in silver the taste of blood. Shapes and contours, the language of this piece, divorced from the oils and shades in the surrounding paintings. The text was the slaughter of women and children, their screams caught in the metallic sheen. It was small enough on the wall to escape notice, but once seen, could not be avoided. Those in the image already mutilated and dead were only grotesque, but those forever sculpted in the moment before the knife plunge formed the essence. In them was the ultimate representation of life in full realization of itself. The sheer definition of death revealing its equal rival in life. This was something only recognized, not imagined. When the moment embodied in these frozen figures is a remembered experience, the voices penetrate their timeless prison. The wails reverberate through the still-lifes hanging the walls.
John broke through the doors with an entourage attempting to restrain him. His rage pulsed along the halls; I and the other patients watched in apprehension. I understood his eyes puncturing the contorted mask of his face and I loved him. Unadulterated desperation. He fought, not against the men grasping his arms but against the war suspending him between his end and his hope. The inferno of his eyes faded finally under a mass of sedatives, though not able to diminish the source. A mere postponing to offer manageability to the doctors’ hands. The vehemence in his being, caught in the struggle, was the violence of gaining the clear delineation of this existence. No tritism could speak of the chasm between deathly apathy and the clutch of life. If ever sight opens upon the absolute distance of life, a visible surface above our fathomless sea, the fight until death will begin. The fury in this man was that of finding that surface forever removed and the moss entangling the thrashing of his limbs.
Our domain of taupe walls bore witness to the wails of unadorned need. Each depleted soul wandered the sun-starved halls craving flesh and blood. The phantom figure of dreams bled through each haunted eye, drawing ceaselessly to its faceless form. What flesh to clutch but our own? Knife edge to bring forth traces of life, yet only draining what remains. The embrace of another, together consumed in the paralysis of drowning. The chimera of our frames caught in each moment, desperate for the one breath of reviving sustenance.
***
It is a sacrament spanning the history of the church. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Each week, consuming bread and wine, the remembrance is not of twelve men the night before Christ’s death. It is the taste of need: the need for this man’s death to sustain each blood-drained soul. By the definition of his ravaged flesh could mine find itself awakened. The slaughter of the Innocent.
(Black?)
The day hung dead weight, pressing itself into the earth. Each moment pulling a greater thickness to itself, subduing all to breathless dark. Suddenly, the sky breathes into itself and blows across the land with the force of a day held. A breaking new oppression not broken yet. The sun set green in a blood black thickness. Electricity riding on skin and trembling leaves.
It starts as a game. Imagining his face twitching into a smile, his hands pulling into fists. The heavy black stone melting in streams to free the breath beneath. The moment I realize I cannot stop these chimera gestures, my own blood stands still. The next moment he will open his eyes. The next moment he will see me.
Thirty-six stories above the sleeping city, the clock glows three. My naked form shrouded in the window hangings, hidden for a moment from his eyes. Eyes searching the pale glimmer of glass and steel. Uncalled and unknown, a silent breeze carries a voiceless song through the night. Dreamless death scatters before this euphony entering my vision. In a gasp of time, a whisper of transcendence, there was a More penetrating the unforgiving silence. He broke into the moment and brought conclusion with the touch of his hand. The window received my back as I turned again to his embrace.
A couple months and a sea away from the hospital, I sat on a star-washed dock guarded by the hills of the Lake District. With disturbing simultaneity, moments of the past months layered upon themselves to the thickness of night. A couch, crimson candle, dying firelight, and his last touch. New-harvested corn bathed in moonlight, his face resting against me and etched upon the sky. Two in the morning and writing letters to my few lost loved ones of my death. All these things suddenly conflating to a great stillness in this new place. Love claiming every moment as its own, ashes gathered as gold threads. The night enveloped me as pain and hope found each other equal in the perfection of this moment.
At the culmination of all existence, only black quiet remains. Every moment held in breathless anticipation of what must come.
