A Moment In This Life

I’m here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence. I’m here and I’m away, drifting towards the glass. You’ll see me pressed there like yellow butterflies that, careless with the ecstasy of life, have met death on the highway. There are things rushing by, indifferent to my delicate constitution.
My small shape, growing like salt crystals under the light of a microscope. I never was a big thing. I am a big thing still. I feel trapped, like a bee in a bag, incapable of returning to the hive, confused, so confused by the clear plastic walls of my prison. Try to tell, tiny insignificant me, that my confinement has been orchestrated because I am capable of stinging the children of the dark gods. My punishment is death for the crime of causing some potential pain.
It melts like tiny hailstones between the fingers of a curious child. Tell me why the rain freezes up in the bellies of clouds. Is it because the clouds were cold mothers? Now their children fall to earth stinging the flesh of man beasts, perishing upon impact. One tiny bite as they pass, then they are transformed by this new encounter and become drops of water dribbling down between fingers.
Without knowing the beginning nor the end, I take flight, here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence, always here traveling across the universe, the one song, the only song I know yet. A folk musician likely wrote it, a girl with a guitar and a leather headband. Her mother must have looked the same.
Music fools my bag of bones into hypnosis. I’ll dance the dance of the swirling snow and the humming wasps, of the poor, poor butterflies fluttering from flower to flower. Is there something wrong with being alive?
There is something wrong… I feel trapped. There are chains of laziness that won’t let me take flight, thick cords of heavy sleep fastened in all the right places, strings that push me, pull me, make me move, spasmodically, towards the highway.
Death then is the final ringing of the bell. It is; when I count to three you will open your eyes and forget everything which we have just discussed…
If I had been hypnotized, how would I know? How would I ever know? As I take these steps, as the sounds lift my insides to a dance, I can never know. Why? What is happening? Was it because I had a cold mother? Why, why, why do I fall?
Waves of space engulf my senses. I am drowning. See how my mermaid hair reaches up toward a forgotten sun? The gates of reality come rushing to meet me. Without knowing the beginning nor the end, I have come to this place again. I pass beyond the threshold, just as I have before.
Whirling with the dizzy pleasure, I find myself on the highway. I’m here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence. I’m here and I’m away, drifting towards the glass. You’ll see me pressed there, growing like salt crystals under the light.
I never was a big thing. I am a big thing still. Trapped like a bee in a bag, incapable of returning to the hive. I am here. And I am away.

In The Theater

I went to the movies yesterday, when the sun was bright and the sky was clear and the entire city seemed to be busy doing other things. I didn’t have a movie in mind, any would do. I walked through carpeted halls that smelled of popcorn, entering different theaters at random, number 12, then 2, then 7. I pulled the heavy doors open, just getting a quick glimpse of what was going on at the moment. Men yelling in the trenches, a girl walking down a forest path, a teenager in the back seat of a car, a man with a gun. I tried to avoid the temptation of staying in one place, I forced my feet to move, pushed my own elbows off the armrests by sheer will, quickly walking into the light-filled halls once again.
Soon, I realized that there was one theater I didn’t want to visit, I kept avoiding it with each pass. The door was covered by a maroon curtain, and just walking in front of it gave me an overwhelming feeling of dread and impending doom. Like a strange tide, I felt my body pulling me in the other direction, while another part of me knew what must be done. I escaped the light, the popcorn and the safe patterns of the thin carpet. I went in.
The previews were just ending. The movie was about to start and I looked into the rows of empty seats. I was alone. I realized they were showing the feature to an empty room. Not one sign of life. No oxygen, no carbon, no breath. And then the questions began: Why would they do that? Who would do that? Was the process so mechanized that the movie just begins and ends regardless of the audience? Was there a man up there, behind the flickering light, responding to orders? I looked at my ticket, I should not be here, not in this theater. The ticket I bought was for another movie, another theater, another audience, other seats. This show couldn’t be running just for me…they couldn’t know I was here, the lone man in an empty theater.
I sat down twelve rows from the front and in the center. In the film, aliens make the whole city fall asleep to steal their memories. Halfway through the movie, I realized I had fallen asleep on cue. Someone had yelled at me to stop snoring, but I looked around and found the same lonely chairs, the same quiet stench. There was no one with me. I had dreamed the yell.
I kept watching the movie and looked around every so often to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I found no evidence one way or the other, except that the movie seemed to be just ordinary scenes of ordinary people doing nothing in particular, and I wondered what had happened to the aliens.
I found myself becoming more intrigued by the green ‘exit’ sign to the left of the screen. I wanted to get up and go through it, to find the door or stairs or another world with an alien carrying my memories. I wished to walk beneath the sign’s green glow, only I seemed to be glued to my seat. A heavy metallic atmosphere pushed me down. The smell of plantain soup would come and go. I was confused by the green sign and its message. Was it informing me of the exit? Was it a suggestion? A command?
Meanwhile, the movie on the screen continued. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. And me, here, watching.