Splash of Red in a World of Grey
(Dedicated to Yumna, Ian, James, Lucas, Maria, Ezra, Millo, Fionnuala, Ana, and all the fellow children I met whose richness of spirit and fortitude I will never forget.)
His grasp on the narrative is fickle, but it returns to him in parts; where he laid himself to rest, he lost himself to New England estuaries, if he’d put his affairs in order—or maybe he hadn’t.
He couldn’t quite remember which it was, and though he would have liked to speak to her for one last time, there lay the final correspondences, unsent, moldering and stashed in cases of manila folders without postage.
There was neither a bequest nor a vision nor a sentiment left in this world or the next, for he was but a cogwheel being ground to dust in the maw of a chaos machine.
Arduousness had expunged hope, wringing and wringing and having wrung out the final vestiges of will, it left a ringing in the ears.
A cry, a wail of surrender, an incessant counting, praying, pleading howl languishing in the mind.
A reverberating, consuming beast’s lament.
It was an impossible dread that bit and tore, a venom leaching, titrating into tight bands around his muscles until he was left writhing in the shower drain.
A pressure, inordinate, klaxons blaring a warning whose threat never dropped.
It was an inexorable contrition, unbearable, insufferable to bear its brunt.
He lived, yet he was not alive, for what choice did he have?
His eyes told the blank tales of sleepless years, a façade of indifference projected forth to plaster over the suffering of boiling showers and roiling thoughts.
They were not thoughts so much as they were scant agonies that imbued themselves like intractable shrapnel in his consciousness, ripping through mental sinews with a vengeance.
But he knew that he was not this—this violence that invaded and left him gasping in the twilight hours under the mass of a thousand repetitions, of contortions and whistles and scrubbing and bleeding and locking and checking and tapping and perfecting and scouring and asking WHY?
He exaggerates not to say that he spent years of his life in the washroom, spent decades condemning himself for the immoral thoughts that racked his mind.
The things he had no control of, the things that happened, that he devised magical ceremonies to erase from his life in sequences of threes and eights but not twenty-fours, the people who made him sit alone to prevent their depravity from contaminating him.
Alone, his sole companion was the thought.
He would return himself to unbeing and nothing would change, and nothing would be better or worse than before.
And it was when he was about to perform the ultimate deed, when the days in the crucible were about to be punctuated by the ultimate act of helplessness, he saw her for the first time.
It was staring into a cracked mirror, the brokenness no longer a reflection of who he was, who she was, who any of them, the small anxious children and the miserable adolescents, were.
The friendship, the ubiquity of their experiences, the longing not for death, but for a different life—it was being granted love for the reflection that was there.
They could not promise each other happiness, or salvation, or freedom, or nirvana, or certainty.
But they could promise that they would no longer be alone. And this was enough.
