Damsel in the Red Dress

White Noise

An overgrown forest - awake with every breed of twisted, haunting wood - trees lean inwards at sharp angles, branches outstretched like knotted withered hands casting thick shadows - pouring in from all sides with unnerving solidity - a cluster of spring flowers - radiant shades of purple and blue - blossoms like a wildfire in a strangled halo of white-gold sunshine.

It's been a long time since Minerva's been willing, as the quote says - since the muses have come to visit of their own volition. Technically, there are no muses for visual art, other than Terpsichore. Still, I find the concept poetic.

Setting the clean canvas on its perch, I dry my hands on my dirty jeans and grab my phone from the coffee table. I find that picture of the chickadee in my chat history and study it carefully, one hand stroking an imaginary beard. It's way too blurry for hyper-realism, all the details smeared and slurried into hazy suggestions of light and shadow, body, and fullness - which are only synonyms when we talk flavor, the superficial.

Impressionism it is, I guess.

It's necessary at this stage to keep the body numb, lest the pain trigger spasms, or seizures, raging against the pain. Turbulence at this level, when you've broken this much, sunk this far, would seal your fate.

I'm trying to count sheep, or do something else equally boring, going off on a tedious train of thought that can lull my consciousness into that state of extreme, mindless drivel that would put me to sleep, instead, I keep going off on rabbit trails.

Inspiration drowns the melatonin - visions of beauty - and memory drowns the visions - beautiful ugly - just plain ugly, more often than not.

I see the first room I ever had to myself, in that studio apartment I rented from the time I was a sophomore in college until the spring of my junior year - the one with the spiders in the walls.

I see the first buds of springtime, pregnant with dew, bursting rainbows at the seams - red oceans of clouds phasing through the ruddy tint of a wineglass window - leaving the bloodstains behind as they push their way through the crystal walls. Clean white versions of them rest easy on either side of the tragedy, 'phasing through phases' with an ease that the strongest bodies would envy. I'm not one of them.

It's nearly 2 a.m. I'm going to be so tired in the morning. Technically, it's already morning, I know. I'm going to be so tired when the clock tells me it's time to pretend to try to live another day.

I'm going to see Kattar in the afternoon.

I haven't visited him nearly enough since the accident, and I'm worried he'll think that I'm angry with him. It's harder than it oughta be - to force myself out of the house and go keep him company.

I say it's because of the cold, and the distance when anybody never asks - When I'm tired of lying, I admit it's because I'm a selfish little jerk - and there are some things that I really don't want to know. A whole lot I don't wanna see.

I found another scar - high up on my back, running between my shoulder blades in a long vertical snake, like a crooked mountain range on a topographical map. I follow it to its furthest edge, feeling it vanish at the ends of my fingertips back into smooth, unbroken skin. But it's enough to ruin the whole picture, like an off-color streak where the cheap paint flaunts its flaws, defiling the picturesque with its boldfaced imperfection.

I think of the half-finished chickadee, standing with her skeleton, pencil-sketched wings outspread like a tiny jet plane, with no eyes, and only the shaky idea of a beak, in faint hairline cracks made of graphite.

Tribes of butterflies sifting from the sky like painted snow to light on the red-faced posies dancing in the grass. Flocks of white birds flying south for the winter - their reflections falling softly on the little pond by the city park with the swings gutted out and the seesaw frosted over.