Saturday, June 18, 2011

New Eyes


I looked through his eyes and the world took on another color. The trees were tinged with a bit more orange around their pointed tips, the sky seemed a tad more shiny, just a few degrees brighter than the way I remembered it being.
I had lived with a slightly dull sky, clouds that were white and trees that were green and yellow. Color was a thing which was learned, like religion and dining room etiquette. We had been a family of green and white and pale blue skies and now that my vision had shifted, it was not just the hues which had changed.
My breathing was somehow heavier, coming from deep in the pit of my stomach, deep in the bowels of this creature I had come to know as myself, but it was all different now. A heavier breath pushed my lungs out and up, my mouth had to open to compensate for the highway of air that sought to escape. Each inhalation came with a ringing tone, a sound only audible to me and the tiny birds in the trees just outside the window.
I had stepped into his skin, taking on a new set of habits, just as deeply imbedded in the fibers and filaments of his being as the ones I had somehow, wonderfully left behind. Baggage left in the train station, I no longer needed it. I was free of myself.
My morals, my interests, the groups of words and movements that could have been described with my character, all of them were scattered letters now without a source of light. Things which had been. Bright stars that had fallen, finding themselves now without pull.
Nothing I knew would work now.
But light seeks a source, and soon I flowed into him. I looked for a door, a small little door that I could jam open with my shoe while I sought to understand. His motivations and secret desires flowed, moving through me, up through the pit of my stomach into the wide open highway of my mouth that was his breathing. I was him. I was me, no longer able to distinguish the me that was with the me that is.
The outside world is no longer relevant. Convention, morality, right and wrong, they were for the rest of them, for the masses that submitted and followed without question, without a chance to ever fully become and blossom. They would stay like closed up rose buds on a thorny branch, waiting for a sun that was forever blocked by clouds.
Dreams were different. The nebulous figure of mother. Harsh, imposing icy looks that lasted for days. A kitchen filled with every needed implement of torture. Skies that could only bleed red.
I cried in the mornings. They were no longer his dreams, they were mine. The day was different now, the colors of the trees changed. The sky became purple, the birds no longer sang.


No comments: