There is a speck in the summer pool buoying, if I have to be honest, through the motions of life – grid by grid, palette by palette, a seemingly inconsequential blot in a brilliant blue. If the universe were to blink at that very moment, it may cease to be.
Have you ever contemplated the dichotomy of existence? It is rather strange, is it not, how the world is privy only to a single narrative of you, the one that involves everyday banalities constructed for survival – the boy, the girl, the student, the architect, the farmer, the painter, the writer, the partner, the parent - a bunch of definitives tied together to form a semblance of a whole.
Sometimes, these absolutes feel akin to labelled jars lined on a highway grocery store shelf, waiting to be picked out by a stray itinerant in a thoughtless, disposable purchase. The dusty-brown one looks harmless enough. The blood red would blend in quite well with the backseat. The children like candy, so this should shut them up through the journey!
And then, there is the parallel plotline, the one with the innocuous textures, the labyrinths and the layers, the immeasurable depth; the one that lingers in the dark. Seldom does it find its way to the surface.
Last week, as I sat across the table from a beloved, watching them sop up the final drip of olive oil on the plate with their bread and raise it to their lips, an unexplained anguish clawed its way up my throat. Had I screamed, would it have been possible to accurately relay the abstractions to the other? To be fair, is it even decipherable to the self? Instead, I clutched the edge of the oak table and smiled reassuringly.
The swimmer floats supine in the water with outstretched limbs and closed eyes. The vivid phosphenes are a time machine to the past.
Blink.
White.
Black.
Blink.
Trees and sun chairs and chattering children.
The world is back in focus.
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