You make a better door than you do a window.
—
Transcript:
You can still hear the caramelized brown sugar voice of the mysterious and alluring Bambée as you step along the edge of a steering space blade as ghostly shadows creep across the static screen. At twilight, colors fade, take new forms, and a true reality emerges(you think). The city is bustling and the sick neon lights vibrate in time with your broken heart, now mended. A heavenly event approaches, and the dance of fire and darkness brings a visceral clarity to your fading chaos. They are still there, however, waiting.
You remember them from your first dream, posed nude on the rooftop, staring down at you with no pupils, no irises. The next frame revealed vampire bites to your parents’ horror on the pale neck of your little sister Lucy. Like fixed thoughts and mixed signals, memories are fragmented. Their faces are a halo of the dying sun, and their eyes are deep wells of sorrow. Sorrow was your anchor, your north star, but it dissolved into the air. You hear their voices, like a ghostly whisper, slipping through your hands like smoke. The past scratches your skin and pulls you back, but you’ve managed to trudge forward directly into the rotten teeth and the halitosis wind of fear.
The city, with its mirrored tombstone obelisks on the skyline was the hallucination obscuring entry into this oft-regarded labyrinth, blah blah blah. Your footsteps echo with an optimistic tap show staccato pulse through the alleys of unfinished dreams. Billboards scream coded wishes and neon graffiti appears in the indifferent sky. As an observer, you are isolated, floating in an electric fog. As the moon progresses across the face of the sun and the shadows absorb the light, you recall how close you came to be swallowed up completely by an airless juggernaut of your own devise.
Luna's cold eyes opened indifferently. The stars twinkled like dying sparks. You follow the signs of the zodiac, looking for meaning in moon maps. A real deal solar eclipse, the sun is swallowed by a black hole, but you find a cold comfort in the day for night scene being filmed on a strict budget. You are lost in the maze now, just for old time’s sake, just to always know every corner is closed, and memories are a trap. You ain’t takin’ the bait no more, baby.
A fleeing soul - a lover's embrace, the pain of defeat, the forgotten taste of victory. A spirit whispers in the corridors of your heart. Their voices are quiet, their faces are blurred. You put the pieces together and solve the puzzle of your soul, but they scatter as so many colorful or brown dying leaves in the wind. What difference did it make in the end? The eclipse reaches its climax as a fiery halo surrounds the void. Darkness no longer hides, it opens.
You accept the shadow and let it flow through you. They are part of the contrast that defines you and the light. And in that acceptance you find comfort, a strange calm in the eye of the cosmic storm. The light returns, piercing the darkness to reveal a city reborn in brilliance and the delight of cheering children.
And it’s moving, its neon veins once again vibrating and alive with life. You have been dazzled before the eclipse and are standing on the edge of a fresh, crystallized clarity. The darkness has passed and you are feeling squeaky clean. The way forward is bright and illuminated by the light of your understanding. The pain of your past unshadowed no longer enslaves you, but illuminates a path moving forward.
Each step proves your resilience. The past is now but scar losing color, no longer an open wound. The future is a pale linen, stretched to a frame and yearning to be touched. These eclipses, one above and one within, are guiding you now as you step into the warm glow of, not another chapter, but a new novel altogether. You smile cautiously and breathe the dewy morning air. Your travail in darkness has led you to this crystalline space in time, reflecting the suns rays on all that surrounds you. It feels almost euphoric, for a moment, until you instinctively reach for your sunglasses and retreat into the shade. You want the night, the stars and the moon at least as much as you desire the sun.
It all seems so cliche, so obvious, but you finally understand what balance is and why the past seven years of catastrophe occurred, because you tipped the scale to such extremes in one near fatal direction. You wanted to see how far you could push into chaos and death, against nature itself without being absorbed into the void.
Your experiment is now concluded. You may walk as freely in the sunlight as you have in the shadows. Your eclipse has ended at long last.
ee14 • Something in the Way