The Blue Orb (Aoi ōbu)

青いオーブ

I need to be more honest with myself - I hate the beach. The sand infects me. I despise the way it creeps against my toes, crunches between my teeth. Despite this, I've been walking on this beach for over 9 years. Perhaps it's the internal friction that keeps drawing me back to this god awful shore, feeling the duality between choice and refusal spark up inside my thoughts. I relish in the freedom I get from choosing to indulge in my dislikes. By igniting the neurological connections in my brain that eventually catalyze the reaction of hate, not only do I overcome an obstacle but rise above my environment and simply exist. The sand talks, and I tell myself to listen. Riding the uncomfortably delicate conversation between myself and the element of this world I made a choice to hate. A conversation. I don't know the words but it's the taste that matters. Bitter and stark - a mouthfeel I just can't get used to. I sometimes hope that one day I will take a bite and it'll be sweeter or at least marginally more faint. It is this opposition between my form and my environment that drives me. Or maybe I just hate myself profoundly.

I sink into the sand with each step. My back foot, always lagging behind the other, like two men repeatedly passing a disability between each other. Every once in a while they unite. My left foot reaches out its hand as my right turns its back. Like clockwork, they perfectly avoid one another. The bus drives away as my left foot's hand falls back to its side, stranded at the deserted stop. The disappointment of rejection lingers only until the bus drives by again - an infinite loop that I alone perpetuate with each step. I want quiet, thick, impenetrable. Something silencing, like the fall of rain on ocean waves, water on water: noise cancels, leaving only the salty spray. Neck deep in the water, my skin glows iridescent, transcendent. The sand buries my toes -- I want to vomit -- takes to my rotting foot, enveloping me underwater. I want quiet, the drowning kind.

I really want to vomit. I don't know whether it's a need or a want. It scares me how much we don't know, and how much of that oblivion we take for granted. Do I want to vomit? Or do I need to vomit? A need would render my choice obsolete, powerless. A need states that "whether I would like to or not, I will vomit now." I can really feel it mocking me now. I envy the authority of a need. It exists, packed in a box where it can state with full confidence. It is what it is and I cannot say otherwise. Meanwhile, I feel it but I cannot. If I do, I don't. If I don't, I can't. If I can't, why? Anyway, I vomit. Its clear hue catches me off guard - I guess I haven't had breakfast. A bitterness invades my throat that causes my face to crease at the seams. My skin rumbles as chasms and canyons open up on my face. My vomit just sits there on the sand motionless before being swept away by the tide. It's incredible how quickly I lose track of my own remnants; what was once my own body. The foam bubbles of my puke disappear in an instant amidst the waves. I'm kind of sad to see it go. My eyes slowly climb up the ocean toward the horizon.

My sight goes black. Darker than black.

An excruciating pain overrides my entire body. My veins scream as they viciously dig themselves into my flesh for protection. I feel my pupils expand, violently shattering my iris as the color in my eye crumbles into dust. My head shoots up toward the sky. Over the course of that very movement, accounting for less than a second of my lifetime, a violent barrage of color like I have never seen before - tingling shades my mind had never had the capacity to conjure - stuns me like a bullet. I fall back and desperately scramble, trying to hold a hand that I know is not there. The sand grabs me by the throat and pins me against my back. My heart has mutated into a motion blur, beating so fast and hard that it has taken on a life of its own. I try to seek refuge by turning myself inside out, closing my eyes and hiding in my own body. I grow old, retire, die, and become reincarnated three times over in the span of what must have been a second. I scream. Continuously. I do not stop. My vocal chords slowly rip apart at the seams until my shriek turns into what you would call a deep breath.