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Thursday, May 29, 2008

ACID

ACID

I stood and headed towards the door. Before I got there something caught my eye. It was a simple nail sticking out of the wall. There was nothing happening to the nail, no reason for it to be there, except maybe to hang keys on. Otherwise it was a useless piece of hardware in an otherwise empty space. I had to look at it, touch it, feel its hard, round end. I looked so closely at its metallic shaft that I could almost feel the blows that had pounded it into place. The closer I looked at the nail the more I realised that the wall was breathing. It was pulsing its whiteness in time with my own organic breath.  My warping mind allowed me to communicate with my new, special, white wall-friend. The plaster was hurting, trying to push the thorn in its side out, morphing itself into pustules to expel the metal intruder. I wanted to help. I needed to free the soft, undulating wall from the sharp spike that kept it from being free. I loved the wall. I hated the nail.

I wrapped my fingers around the nasty piece of metal and pulled hard. I wrapped my whole hand around the spike and yanked with all my super sensual strength. Something gave way and I thought I had done a good deed. I had made the wall happy. Instead, a new colour was introduced into our little world. It was bright, hard-to-look-at red that was so rich and ripe you could smell it, iron. It was a seething red that came from the nail and dripped off it in drops of heavy thudding and shaking roundness. The evil nail had gotten its blood on the pure white wall and in response, the wall rippled in waves away from the hot, sticky candy-apple dripping of the nail. I was engrossed with the damage I had done to the cold hardware. I had actually made a piece of metal bleed.

Time had no place to go but in circles as far as I could tell and there is no saying how long I stared at the bleeding nail and the still unhappy wall. The next thing I noticed was a short black woman touching my hand. I had no idea where she had come from and considering that everything else in the room was either white, or now red, she stood out like a fountain of oil in a sun bleached desert.

Getting down onto my stomach, I felt the floor ripple below me as I began my slow breaststroke to the far shore of the hardwood floor. My progress was agonisingly slow and I had to keep stopping to look at the wild grain of the wooden ocean that kept me afloat. Each miniscule millimetre of the wood had a universe of lines and deep colours that went from here to the bottom of the Earth. I took in each detail as they came and my trip across the fascinating floor must have taken hours. By the time I got to the other side, space was gone and what was left of the wall was a loud, crazy cacophony of hues that made my eyes ache and body go limp. I closed them thinking that a little nap might make things come into focus a little bit better, but there was no place to sleep. My entire mind was full of a manic energy that was pulling pinpoints of light out of my thoughts and spinning them into spaghetti waves of energy in the darkness. I lay there pondering the random insanity of my thoughts until I had the notion that maybe I should just sit by the window and see if this was ever going to end.

Rolling over I opened my eyes, stood up, and went to the dark bars that covered the only source of light in the room. Kneeling down, I rested my head against their early evening coolness and let it succour my body. I heard the world humming outside, the cars, the people, the birds, the dogs, the pavement, and let them be as I voyeuristically breathed next to them. Pretty soon, or after a very long while, who knew how long, time joined me at the window.