Sunday, May 6, 2012

Random essays/assignments #4


      I breathed in slowly before setting myself down to work. The night it happened was colored indigo, but there was periwinkle included which possibly indicated the loneliness that draped over my shoulders and which would remain persistent for the rest of the evening, though I suppose I nearly welcomed it in this case, for it only served to speed the writing process. No matter what the circumstance, I always trusted depression to bring me the best-quality ideas borne straight on the wings of messenger pigeons—they arrived sporadically, picking up their pace when music complemented the background with their wings beating to poetic rhythm. The rain outside tapped gently against the windowpane to the same poetic meter, though shorter and much more erratic. My roommates were nowhere to be found; I automatically surmised that they would be absent for the entirety of the dusk.

At the last thought I stood; to this day I cannot describe what compelled me to stand. Oftentimes I stood at ideas that especially piqued my interest, and would take to pacing about the room to help them evolve, though I could not even be entirely certain that I had an idea to begin with. Perhaps, I could surmise, I wanted food at the time—I ended up convincing myself of this, yet even pasta did not satisfy the otherworldly craving that I was incapable of suppressing. I sat back down and stared contemplatively into the endless taunting of the blank document. I did not exactly know where I was going with the paper beforehand, and the aimless feel of it made me eat more. It was mindless indulging that I participated in for the hours that followed and the rain outside fed all of the trees in the woods as I fed myself. I remember bolting to the window and watching the process reveal itself to me; I watched flowers slowly bloom and I listened to the worms slither silently in the deepest crevices in the earth far below me and the entire world beneath my feet began to quake. I questioned the amount of sleep I had been getting, and I didn’t think anything else.

Frankly, I knew already that my surroundings were warped at this point. I was frightened—I surmised I was actually delusional, and possibly incredibly ill. My roommates still weren’t home and I attempted to search for the door, but to no avail; I couldn’t see anything. I wanted to be afraid, but it seemed too surreal for me to be afraid, even though I screamed and covered my ears. The urge to protect myself washed over me and I huddled into what I assumed a corner and made myself as small as I possibly could. I resorted to what one would normally resort to: hiding oneself and waiting for the storm to pass, just waiting for the problem to dissolve over time. I glanced upward from my position—somehow—and still saw a ceiling, except that it was purple.

“That looks like quite the incredible position to be in, dear.” I heard sprightly laugher around every part of me and inside of me. I took my hands from above my head and stared at them, temporarily immobilized. I suddenly found that I was no longer on the ground, but rather on my feet again, except that I was also falling. I dared to gaze below me to discover that the entire atmosphere was sky—I was falling upward, into the sky. The blue slipped in between my fingertips and my hair, and it stained my clothes blue, and my hair became soaked in the essence of blue. The blue seeped into my eyesight and suddenly the only color I acknowledged was blue—my memory of any other color or even anything else in existence became impaired. I did not know how to speak. My stream of consciousness was the only thing reminding me that I was still falling, and that blue was not the only presence that I could detect.

“You act as if this is unfamiliar.” The voice again. The sound of it shattered the thin glass veil of my trance and prompted me awake again.

“You mean my poem?” Any other statement I was tempted to say seemed too superfluous at the time. I still wanted to be afraid.

“What do you think?” The voice mirrored mine. I faltered for a moment.

“That this is my poem.”

“You are your poetry, and this is what you see every day.”

I paused for a moment. This wasn’t going anywhere, I knew. I wanted to try a different approach, though I could not decide where to begin.

“I am allowed to see you?” I asked this because in the poem, the voice had no body. It was a concept, just as most of my written characters were. Just as Levan was.

“It depends—do you want to see me?”

“I feel like I’m not here for nothing, so I think we’re going to have to actually start somewhere.” In actuality, I didn’t want to be falling anymore; the constant sensation was making me anxious.

“We may start once you answer my previous question.” The voice changed drastically this time, into something more rugged. I myself was surprised at the fact that it had not repeated my name yet.

“I figure I should be able to see you if we’re getting down to business, yes.” I felt myself shouting this, and suddenly I was standing on solid blue. I detected a silhouette at the back of my mind, and a separate figured materialized before my eyes. It was a woman—her flowing hair was of a hazelnut shade, her eyes an unnaturally deep green. She was adorned in vivid, vibrant, colorful robes that wrapped all about her body and billowed gracefully in the infinite blue.

“So be it, then,” she said in a defeated manner, “but remember that I am what you wish me to be.”

I stopped myself here—this was all too familiar to me, and it was driving me to insanity. The words that next spilled out of my mouth were not of my choosing, “but I do not know your name.”

“Nor I yours.”

“Why is this?”

“Names aren’t important.” She winked at me, and I knew she was taunting me at this point.

“Why am I here? Did I accidentally kill myself?”

“What do you desire?”

“To get a straight answer.”

She laughed at this, and beckoned for me to follow her. My legs followed her command before my brain did. “I only wished to see you. You write about me so often and never even considered the thought of meeting me, have you?”

At first, I did not understand this; I took a moment to ponder it. She halted her casual amble and turned around to pierce into my very soul with a stare.

“You do not understand because the thought is abstract. Yes—it is true that you have not written directly about me before, but rather, you write about the pieces that form to make me.”

I thought on this again, and suddenly it dawned on me. “Wait, am I in heaven?”

“This is what you perceive as the afterlife. I wanted it to accommodate your innermost thoughts so that you would feel the most comfortable seeing me.” The being with no name pointed above us, and there were stars. Even here, they seemed impossible to reach. “I am creation as you interpret it. I am the concept of willpower, justice, and faith. I brought all into existence and made the universe as it lies here before you. ‘God’ is only one of the names that people call me.” I blinked, letting myself register all of this before I could respond to this. She watched me eagerly, as if she actually didn’t expect what it was that I would try next, and grinned in pure elation.

“All right,” I said finally, beginning to shake, “I’m not going to question any of this at all. I still don’t know why I’m here.” All I wanted was to be quick as possible now.

“What do you desire?”

“You asked me that already.”

“What do you desire?”

I trembled harder. I was beginning to feel more uncomfortable each time the question was asked.

“As in… on what level?”

“You have an instinct that is not common for one to possess,” she muttered, as if musing this to herself rather than actually informing me directly, “but as a result this makes you much more fun to play with.”

“And this comes down to?”

“If you created the stars instead of me, how would you have made them?”

This sounded much too familiar now. Every single snippet of all of my worked began to accumulate into a pool of abstract design. I reached out for it and tried to pull from it.

“You mean, if I could make the world into what I wanted?”

“Yes. I’ve been hand picking people, and in part I was curious, really.” She giggled, setting her elbow on something I could not see. “I want to know what you can come up with. Even know, you’re already lost in the endless possibilities and the numerous ways all of them could go awry, and I love it!” She squealed in the strangest manner I had ever heard, and already the blue sky became duller. She must have given me a time limit the entire time, and the hourglass was near its end. I scarcely even had the chance to comprehend this! I clawed for the image that rapidly blurred away, and I uttered:

“Make them all understand!” I felt as if I were choking, “Make all of the people understand one another—make it so that all realize that perfect objectivity is a sham! Make conflicts of another nature—not of hostility, but rather of truth! Let all colors be accepted at a base level, and heighten teamwork as a whole!” What I yelled in my haste was convoluted, though I knew she still understood. When I began to once more hear the rain streaming fast down the entire world, I was sitting back down in my chair.

I wondered, now, how much different life would be socially, and considered the possibility that I made a mistake. And yet I took it in stride, eventually, because I was tired of being unaccepting of the parts of me that I disliked the most.

For the most abrupt of moments, I began to cry.



Afterword:

The actual name of the creator of the stars is Rufina, and she writes the fortunes of every single living being in the sky. I chose this image of the ultimate creator for a few reasons, though mainly because I don’t necessarily believe in the standard God that I initially thought that I did anymore. When I think of God, I like to think of something more flexible and beyond a greatest dream; I like to think of solving the grand image by piecing it together with one’s consciousness, one by one, until it is complete and the soul is truly one with itself and free. I also honestly would unable to decide what it is that I would change about the world, despite often wishing for it in perfectly ordinary scenarios. I think that, once it actually comes down to it, the weight is much too heavy for a final decision to be so quick, and that foolish (instinctive?) impulsiveness is the only thing that drives me sometimes—I may think of others first, or I may think of myself first. The fleeting time was to indicate the aforementioned impulsiveness, and the confusion embodies how often people question their own beliefs in their everyday lives. The choice was mutual understanding of the globe because, even though there would still be the disagreements and the conflicts that I personally believe that the world needs, at the same time all people would finally be willing to at least acknowledge that every opinion is, in fact, subjective, and that every different perception of the world is also, in fact, subjective (for the record, I also believe in reincarnation, but that is a separate story to be told another day, perhaps). It’s a strange thought and probably not as groundbreaking as it seems, but society truly would be heavily affected as a whole, I think. Also, ‘colors’ does not refer to races, but rather types of people in general.

I think that if I were actually presented with this option, I would think of my sister and go for making Pokémon real.

No comments:

Post a Comment