Prickling static and condensation trickled down my head as I ran my hands through the back of my hair. I went to bed at four the previous evening and awoke in an anxious trance that cast a light fog over the morning. Eventually, I settled into my seat and began my usual commute ritual: allowing my eyes to wander through the various figures and details. Like a brief total eclipse with the violent kinetic energy transfer of a silver ball hitting the bumpers of a pinball machine; I made and lost eye contact.
This repeated a few times until I was thrown out of that interior galaxy, landing into streams of rain streaking diagonally down the window. Like the work of an early Kandinsky or Münter, which had been a recently recurring visual metaphor, the peripheries of all became porous membranes, and strict divisions gave way to gradients. A dense green forest was enchanted by mysterious shadows as small swathes of baby blue and cotton-white oils permeated through. There were such varying contrasts of densities of a singular tone that one would stumble if the wandering eye was too eager, like the feeling of falling in a dream or an overestimated step due to an unknown dip: a strike of paroxysmal incoordination. It was a softening and intensifying of the world amidst a formerly cold monotony.
Amidst that scene, a question rose in me: what would I paint, if I could? What would best resemble these instances of quiet arrest? I thought of the camera, but it was too stark and surreal with its hyper-clarity. No, I would have to be more furtive than that.
Instead, I thought to take my leave with trust in the powers of a renewed gaze, like being the caretaker of a homing pigeon, wandering a space that I could only abstractly conceive of. I release it with a faith that memory will return, on its own time, as novel experience casts directional beams of light into the innumerably sided prism, filling the interior canvas of my eyelids with unsuspected, dancing gradations of color and texture.
I was further coaxed into this state of reverie as I positively misremembered the tonalities in contrast to Cezánne’s grove: chalky aquamarine, speckles of saffron, and daylight clay. It whispered a swirling effect as my head drifted forward; my back simultaneously lifting away from the chair as I peeked outside of that window.
As I stepped out and strolled toward the edges of the landscape, I found just what I needed. I happened to become brittle and dry upon exiting, but a wave washed over me; I was entangled in the fine threads of coolness. I turned around and faced it, beckoned the ocean for more. Sensation could be felt in its quiet differences in the waters where its viscosity was the equalizing adverb for all stuck in its grasp.
Suddenly, I sensed something like an awakening of a long sleeping giant, turned around, and saw a towering conductor lifting his hands. I looked up and noticed that he was spelling out the time signature with small quivers. His eyes were closed and he was so carefully expressive; he resembled Karajan’s physicality that I had resonated with from youth. Because his movement was so measured, so commanding and rapturous, one could tell the essence of any measure from the faintest, unfocused peripheral sight above the stand to the most distant balcony seat. Oh, what ecstasy on display! My stomach dropped in sync with the downbeat as the hidden symphony sank further into its song, a serene legato led by a couple of flutes with the string sections trailing closely behind. The floodgates broke open as a sluice of amber honey flooded the room, gently preceded by that ardent adverb in which both spectator and symphony swim. Is this not dissolving, without care, into an elevated solvent of being? One steps into a singular baptism, a moment of drifting. The lightness of clothing is lost in that leveling consistency.
But when I emerged from my attempted sanctification, a spiritual communion in song, I was not granted countenance. Rather, I felt a stark clinging upon my first steps. The solemn slowness of abandoned submergence lingered, and a cold gravity pulled me to the ground.
As I wobbled in melancholy, the elements unexpectedly rescued me once again: a blanket of velvet red began to spread as vibrance shone through the clouds and through the curtains protecting my corneas. I now found myself in a higher strata as I dared to open my eyes: a penumbra bordered by an almost limpid red intensified in saturation and brightness on the beige stucco wall as she reappeared. I was, and still am, surprised by her tenderness. A careful grace with an infectious earnestness. For me, she never had to make sense, and since I was always scared to sound out the virgin syllables, I always repeated after her. She was like a saccharine autumn, a corner of a world that I wanted to rest in. I was no longer afraid of stumbling.
Ribbons of that youthful resemblance fell from that shadow emanating red, spinning like the winged seeds of a maple tree looking for fertile soil. It was here that love sprouted in an intensity that broke the ground of a harsh winter. And yet, my conception of her was so fragile to the touch, that it crumbled like dry leaves in my hands.
And yet, every sapling, every maple, was never the same. I am convinced, no, strangely, I know… because… I don’t know. I know because I never know my pain or pleasure really: each instance has its own signature, that which delimiting efforts never seem to surround. I am interminably orbiting, searching for where I started, losing myself along the way. Pleasure and pain are mere infinities, and language is a child that presses its ear against a room with no exits in sight, only to make out the most figurative of sounds, the ranging tenor of the voice enough to shake one into a fitful insomnia, or guide one to lush slumbering pastures.
All of a sudden, another wave lifted me into a gentler buoyancy. For a brief second, walking moved with the ebb of an ocean with a genteel temperament, we climbed and sank in such exact synchronicity, that it was as if we were scaling and descending octaves. I then waved my feet and looked for somewhere to stand, only to be tossed again into a total suspension, like the parent who tosses their darling into a brief and rhapsodic ascension. What is it to never lose the desire to land in someone's arms? To feel ever-renewed fear and excitement within the bounds of safety? Again and again, heaven is a recurring rhapsody that retains that feeling of novelty.
However, through some ambiguous vehicle of association, I now felt the coarseness of the residually warm pavers on my feet as I prepared to jump in to join my siblings. The night swim at Uncle Huy’s neighborhood pool resonated with a compendium of childhood sentimentality deep within me: refracted ghosts materialized and danced on the tired, porcelain-tiled walls as we shared our secrets in submergence, channeling all of ourselves in the ambient, bubbling murmur of our summer games.
As we left the pool that evening, I observed the coal-black butterflies epitomizing solitudes in love; they had such individual signatures of boundless delight as they fluttered with a zeal bordering on total jouissance, and they would barely graze one another every third or fourth moment. I then looked upwards and envied the way the trees governed by wind opened up in shimmering warmth, the notation of a certain musical style that takes the edge off of a world. I exhaled in delight as I reclined into the thicket background.
Our monochromatic blue towels that covered the seats were quite damp as we entered to the familiar smell of mom’s cooking, a familiar aromatic medley of caramelizing brown sugar bubbling with soy and fish sauce. I turned away from the clamor of the pans and fans and the wafted scent toward the synthetic, vinyl hardwood. I tapped my pruned toes and bounced my balding basketball against the surface to feel its artificiality and it left a dead feeling under my feet. Then, I looked up and saw a composite drawer with a rosewood finish, the door hanging by a combination of teal and pink rubber bands, shakily holding together, bouncing up and down, threatening to fall on our feet whenever we opened it and hid the worst parts of ourselves.
It, like almost everything in my childhood, was a poorly told lie: a thoughtless cliché, a dilapidated metaphor. I would dream endlessly about nestling into Truth’s warm chest, resting on its stomach as its signs of life rose and fell like those gentle waves. Because of this longing, I became particularly adept at seeing through the artifices of my youth: I envied the security of those closer to the comfort of our ideal, living between the fortified bastions in which they could move freely and fiercely.
Sometimes, we would have to take naps when the heat was too much for us to bear, and our parents would periodically check on us to make sure we were sleeping. I, however, thought I was cunning. I squinted my eyes so that I could still barely see, and slowed my breathing so as not to make a single noise. I didn’t want to sleep, so I practiced voyeurism. I wanted to palpate the surface of the undisturbed, which flickered like a thirty-five millimeter film projection warming up in a musty, dimly lit theater. This was the secret living in which I had a greater faith over any godhead or youthful myth. It was exhilarating, a fearful bliss that came with trespassing into forbidden territory.
Motivated by this youthful enterprise, my gaze would always gravitate toward somewhere I could hide whenever I would enter a foreign space, I would shrink to fit spaces where I could feel the richness of the candid behind those cabinet doors, safe in the dark, peering my one eye through the crevice. I was always painfully aware of the modulation of space, and I knew the real was sensitive in this way: a wisp of smoke, a disintegrating painting of heat on a cold surface. I was drawn to these scenes like a moth to a candle with scarlet wax overflowing its oxidized copper dish, creating a novel terrain as it re-solidifies.
I would flutter and circle the dwindling flame as the wick expired in awareness of its being watched. I took one last glance at the new creation before the star I orbited around was reduced from yellow-white to the faintest glow of dark orange as it was enveloped by the indifferent dusk, surrendering the gravity of the space to pure weightlessness.
But just as an incoming heavy night threatened to enfold me, a foreign incandescence bled through and separated a series of leaved arches: opacity wasn't enough to conceal the truth. Like matted and trampled tissue paper streams waving in the aftermath of a celebration, or a tumbleweed staleness, one could hear faint remnants of the chattering souls wandering the remains of a fading nocturnal bliss. And if one looked carefully enough, one could see the dream rendered soberingly uncanny by the blunt disposition of morning light.