.passages.

Vantage Point

ONE

Syrena stands some feet from the edge of the megastructure, daydreaming. She positions herself awkwardly, facing towards me and leaning on the horizontal beam by which the seraphim had been murdered. She shifts her weight over the front edge of the concrete and seats herself. Her translucent dress follows her legs as they timidly rise atop the cold surface. She rests on her side with her thigh and elbow, playing with her dress in the other hand. The sun is shining through her.

My glare turns her skin pale and her appendages anxious. What happened? In our yellow-green sanctum. Not the yellow of a sunflower’s petal, but the yellow of cystic acne. Not the green of thriving moss, but the green of a hideously corroded gutter. You are not the green of thriving moss, but the green of a hideously corroded gutter.

You have fallen back into the sewers of your past and kneeled to the ordinary. When life led me forward in wind rushes, why did it offend you? You always said that you wanted what’s best for me, but now that I no longer require your validation, I am acting rash? I shall live and let you live, whilst you are scrutinising every minute decision I make.

Syrena lays some inches from the edge of the megastructure, overwhelmed and exhausted. It feels like the whole world is right here in this room. There is nothing worth seeing. There is nothing worth feeling and there is nothing worth knowing. There is nothing worth doing and there is no-one worth meeting. There is nothing worth believing and there is nothing worth loving. There is nothing worth living and there is nothing worth anything.

TWO

I am sad and I am sorry. I am sad and I am sad. Watching a child cry is watching my burning soul as I commit blasphemy. My only responsibility is to prove to my children that life is honestly worth living. I will brush paint on a canvas and bestow something pleasant. It will distract me from my nihilist self for a moment. Then I’ll use it as a mat inside my shower. My windshield is cracked, so complex that each obscured shape encapsulates a single piece of the puzzle ahead. So I paint a picture in my mind of a vast mint-green blanket.

The blanket is drawn upward to each and every object as if it’s holding them upon pedestals. It is sleepy. The area which I lay on is my lowest point, my weight is not held up by the nature of this realm. I imagine floating above the lattice of technology and mechanical nonsense. I sift between the teal cones and breathe out slowly. Nothing catches my eye.

My thoughts are clearer now, my arms are not as weak. My cord is loosened and my hair grows farthest down my neck. The softest glimmer of light is even across the blanket, each object is almost black. I just remembered that the only thing is being, for I won’t be soon. I had forgotten that the objects were even there, or were they not. The blanket’s rises are falling and without collapsing beneath the plane which I lay on, they sit perfectly flat. I remembered that I am real, and nothing is not. As I fall into the verdigris sheet my mind is empty. I had forgotten that the only thing is being, for I won’t be soon.

The blanket catches me and I am enveloped by its entirety. I don’t breathe, and I don’t need to. My whole self is being and so is everybody else. I just remembered that every other person has a blanket, though they have left it to rot with the metal. So why am I different? Oh yes, I am not.

My windshield is awfully shattered and I have prayed I will never see anything.