"A Truthful Lie"

A Truthful Lie

Red trees tower over the greyish-brown river, turning and bending around what seems like a blueish crowd that was last seen cowering from the threatening dark; I’m there but colorless, watching the nature-less forest flourish and change to become nothing but a soulless garden. So I take some steps forward and all is mixed, like a cocktail, the colors sway in a never-ending battle, where one tries to transcend another, and then the other hits back. It’s incredible how easily it all fluctuated, because I’m now not where I was before, green was victorious, and it’s all that fills my distracted pupils.

Do I continue moving my lifeless limbs into the green, or do I brush the fog? But there isn’t any fog. Now there is. Strange. Why would I be able to see or sense something that isn’t there in the first place? I will walk, and so I did, and in my walk I was able to see things, and in that moment where my lenses focused the reflected light from those exact things to my retina, which then transferred electric signals to my optic nerve, which then helped my brain create images of those things, I thought of nothing but the fact that my eyes were creating images from bouncing electromagnetic waves. Wait. Stop. An inconsistency.

What looks like the river returns with such a spectacle it leaves my senses numb, much like the groggy stage right before one passes out unconscious; it leaves my tongue with a heavy taste of magnesium, as the pills I take every morning. But the river isn’t a river but rather a building, tiny, centered in the middle of a sea of green, which ended up turning into leaves that cracked under any type of pressure, much like the bricks of the same river that broke to the softest touch of my fingers, that were able to reach the wall after I walked there whilst only being able to think about the river that had returned into my view. I heard the howl of a wolf, or was it a monkey? An animal. Maybe. A shriek? A strange up and down of an unstrung ukulele; sound from nothing, nothing from sound. I’m confused.

Birds fly over my head through the non-existent fog that muddles my mind into a hot mush, like what once filled the horizons with those aggressive colors. The fog. I think it’s gone. Maybe. There’s sand between my toes, and I don’t even know if I have shoes, sandals, or snakes on my feet, it hurts, tiny pinching that directly reach my nerves, shooting electric signals through my cells, popping off synaptic procedures that fire up pains across my body; a demon ripping me from the inside out. My thoughts are back on the crippled grey bricks that fill my perspective, I realize that there is a door, brown and small, on the most left side of the western wall that is shorter than both the northern and southern walls it makes ninety degree right angles with. I turn my body to the left, and move myself from the center of the wall to the center of the door and open it up. A creak, a white web of fear engulfs the entrance. I don’t know what to expect.

The shriek occurs once again. Distraught flows along with my blood through my capillaries, veins, and arteries, literally filling my body with a dreaded anxiety. There is a knife grasped tightly between my fingers, the soft body making contact with my sweaty right palm, or maybe it was a machete or a spoon. Who knows? Clearly I’m not in that range of people, ever. I’m in. Pitch black. Where do I go? Bad question. I reach out, spread my arms like the wings of an eagle in the midst of an excursion in look out for a furry banquet, or maybe one with colorful scales, and feel my surroundings; to my right a rectangular structure, which after much tactile investigation, was concluded to be somewhat of a bookcase without the books: a case, and to my left, the inner part of the northern wall, to which I denominated as such due to some strange reason I hadn’t thought about before, but that has now completely booked all the rooms in my brain. How did I figure out the directions of this wet desert without a compass? What direction should I be going? Does it matter? Why am I here? North is but an empty shell that has arbitrarily been filled with meaning by a past elite, and that actually points south because opposites attract and the magnetic field lines are “exiting” from there, it just exists to confuse me. Ah. The wall is wet, in contrast to the flaky exterior, the grey monotonous beef wellington was cooked a medium-rare. Mmmm… Beef. I’m not hungry though. What?

The room suddenly has a dim light sprouting from the south-western corner, diagonally opposite to me, that, although dim, penetrates any and all objects in its path, including the rusty steel no-book bookcase, which causes my inevitable tripping over it, due to my complete riddance of it from my mind because of the source of this strong-soft light that causes me to truly, truthfully, and honestly say that it is the most beautifully exquisite thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Well, not really, that’s quite the hyperbole, but I can truly, truthfully, and honestly say that my hormones are acting up and it is the most beautifully exquisite thing I’ve seen taking into account my present memories of my recent past, which is now completely blacked out as I currently try to retrieve it because the only two things I am thinking about are the fact that I am thinking about are the light source and retrieving a past I know I won’t be able to retrieve because the light source is so attractive. A woman.

A lady. She is the source of light in this darkness. Someone I know very well. And as I get closer, she gets brighter. Laying down in the corner in fetal position, she cries a woeful shriek, the same one that had haunted me before, and that has come back, giving meaning to a small part of my existence. I walk towards her, but not in the same way I had walked in the flow of colors that had previously moved across the valley, but in a more protective, conservative way, much like a pup that is forced to a family in exchange for a chain of numbers or some bills and must walk a few meters from its cage to its new “mother’s” arms, in the hallways of the dirty building that is the dog breeder and or pet store. She’s beautiful, but crying, and I can’t stand myself standing anymore. So I sit. I’m stupid. I stand back up again. She’s just there. Do I go? She’ll probably scream and run, something that has happened to me in dreams before. And now I am retrieving past memories, but only about unreal things, maybe because she is just as unreal in my eyes. She stretches her neck like a mermaid splashing her hair back after evacuating from a sea of impurities. She’s lovely, I’m freaking out. She hugs me. I think I just pissed myself. The droplets role from her eyes to her cheeks to my shoulders, leaving a small circular area that is of a slight different tone than whatever I’m wearing. I try to comfort her; my mind is racing with ideas about what happened to her and what I can do to help, but my car is jacked and I slow down into the pit stop of thought. She’s sad. Yeah of course. But there is nothing for me to do, I am paralyzed by her sadness and her beauty. She kisses me. Colors flow and clash once more. I’m falling. My world is destroyed. The soft touch of lips is no more, savagely removed. She’s gone, I’m gone. Darkness returns. I’m dreaming. Not anymore.