The eve of the not-Eve



I never expected a night as dark as this. A night so dark and dense as to strip away all senses. No sight, no sound. Only texture. A fibrous mass of nothingness. A wall of ebony, painlessly constricting like the tentative first coiling of a constrictor snake around a warm unsuspecting abdomen. It fell so silently, stealth like, creeping, seeping in above, below and around me that it took moments of panic and anxiety to subside before I felt my eye balls in my sockets and my breath warm and fast in my nostrils to realise this was night. That some creature had not stolen in and ripped my eyes from my skull. Though perhaps I fall victim to moments of wishing one had. These eyeballs are weary and worn. Irises thinner than spider silk and just as colourful, reflecting light, reflecting black. Even in the darkness, they shine like feline orbs, green and yellow.

I wonder to myself, (out loud even, maybe) how it is I can recall colour in such a vast deep colourless void. I move my hands, knowing they waver left and right, though direction seems ludicrous when one cannot "see". And my mind sees strange things. Tendrils of neon and technicolour trails that radiate from my fingertips like a sparkler in the dark and I write my name in the air watching the letters fall to the ground, unfamiliar to me now. Will I ever know the true form of letters and words ever again now that the darkness has come to be? Will I ever know all of these things that only yesterday I took for granted that toady I have already forgotten? Even time has no place here in this, this nothing. I am neither young nor old. Male or female. I know not what I am or even who I am or how I came to be.

Vague images float in the recess of my memory, if it can indeed be called that. Of a life in a world full of brightness and shadows. A land of colour, sound and words. A land where words are written, a land where voices speak in a timbre and pitch, where mouths make a perfect ballet on a face and push words out through teeth and over soft musk pink lips. A world I believed I imagined. Though I have no conscious notion of ever knowing what colour, timbre, pitch, mouths, ballet, words, lips musky pink or teeth are. Merely thoughts that run untethered through my 'mind'. And I am puzzled again as to what minds and imaginations could be, how they came to be in this darkness and how I came to be in possession of such things.

I can see outlines. Flashes of shadows amongst the shadows. Layers of smoke, heavy and scented, mull around my nostrils, both pleasant and not. Passionflower, sandalwood. Frangipani and limes. I know not what these things are, only that they be. Such simplicity and complexity in a single thought. What am I? Who am I? How am I? It never ends. This voice, this ideate that thunders in the base of my skull, echoing in my ears and expelling itself from my lips.



2004-03-31 8:56 p.m.