Let there be nothing on earth but laundry; white
translucent sheets moved to angelic form. Oh, let there be nothing on earth but
hazy and weighted eyes. White light filtered through speckled plastic like
sunlight on oil. One black, one white, but too far apart to know one another,
in color and geography – but of the same matter, of the same earthy origin.
She
picks at my teeth like a fish kisses algae set behind watery blue walls. These
walls are the same watery blue, and my anxiety has entirely dissolved, pouring
out of my eyes and into them. “Are you comfortable?” My little fish asks with
the sort of concern, genuine or manufactured, that can’t trek past my muddy
ears. My hands are slack, and my glasses have fallen into my lap. I would have
thought that alone would have said enough, but she treks on. “You look very
tense.” I think I must always look tense, because right now I’m not musing
about the razor hovering above my mouth or the instruments just outside my
peripheral vision, but rather, her movements and my own little glass tank feel
so much like breathing instruction manuals - metaphors moved to shape and
atoms. Sometimes silly little turns of phrase seem like this to me, but that
has more to do with me than the reality of the world; never trust atoms, they
make up everything. The weight of those words – of that little joke – could
send a thoughtful person to into spirals.
Even
when I was very little, tall enough to walk but not tall enough to remember the
year, I would move inconsequential watching to metaphor, observations on the
truth of things. Truth. I’ve heard so much in my life about how there is a
difference between “Truth” and “truth”. Where on paper the distinction is
subtle, the distinction in reality lends the word the sort of authority that
“God” yields; it stands a little taller, and does so by crawling over and on
top of implications of irrefutable grandeur.
This is not the truth I speak of. Truth is
gentler than that – more fluid and all encompassing. I’ve always felt that
truth does not know right and wrong. Truth does not care what you believe. One
memory comes to mind – a hot spring I loved to go to when I was a child living
with my grandparents. As they got older my aunt would take me on walks and
little trips that they did not. She lived in town and would pick me up in the
afternoons. The hot spring was a tiny pool with edges that were slick and
slanted towards a hill, carved away so that people could climb up the slick grass
– all of it matted and streaming
downwards like thin scales, save for pivots made by uneasy knees and elbows
into the dense mud. At the bottom of the hill I sat, too scared to jump off the
muddy mound into the water. They are strange things, memories. They come as a
series of visions, chalky paintings on the inside of dark lids. To me this one that
always appears the same every time I call upon it. An image of the water from
above, framed with trees and leaves – though I know it was impossible to see
from this particular angle, for I would have to be off the ground and in the
sky. It was so beautiful, and they hill so high. I sat at the bottom and
thought of how it must look from up there, but the people steadily making their
way up never looked. Instead they pressed their eyes to the ground and I
pressed mine to them. Why wouldn't they look? Were they so afraid of sliding
down the soft ground? Later, the irony of this was no longer lost on me. What
was true for them was true for me.
Do you ever recall moments where you have been
struck by truth? Moments when, amongst the fever of mentally filing away
thought and facts and feelings you are overtaken by a quiet sense of “this is
how the world will be.” By a quiet sense of indifferent content in knowing a
little more about the world around you, not about its absoluteness, but rather,
knowing its movements and its intuitions. People tend to look down at their feet. People to
tend to care more about where they are going than what is around them – no
matter the beauty. My little fish fills my mouth with water and my thoughts
move to now, to the metal octopus she holds hands with. Its tubes and different
appendages seem to take up the whole room, my room, my little watery walled
tank.
To read the poem from which this piece was inspired, go here.
