Whenever you blink, there are flashes of light, right along the edge of your vision. Have you ever seen them?
I used to look for them. I sat once, blinking, until my forehead grew tired from the strain. you see, that elusive flash of light is not from actual light. It's a reaction of your brain, trying to reclaim the light it lost when your eyelids closed. It's spontaneous, uncontrollable, and indecipherable. It's a waking dream.
When I was seven, the flashes stayed for longer. I tried to see the faces that my brain made in the light.
Now that I'm old, the flashes are too short. They only remind me of the relationship I once had with the inside of my lids.
Now I run from the memories of happier times.
Last Tuesday I went for an hour without blinking. I closed my eyes and sat in the darkness, hoping to not need to see the flashes.
Now I see patterns in the dark.
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I see them. Both of them.
ReplyDeleteWhy run from memories? They aren't chasing you.
Do you have to do one to the exclusion of the other, or can you find beauty in both (I think you can)?
I don't know. This is the first one in a while that doesn't have much me in it.
ReplyDeleteIt's more about . . . what. Lost youth? Too morbid. Sorrow? Something.
Once in high school, I wrote about a magic box that would tell stories to your mind when you looked inside. It was perfect and awesome and wonderful, but you had to believe. The old man who told the story owned it his whole life, and his whole life he tried to give it away.
ReplyDeleteNot, you must understand, because he didn't want it, but rather because he knew someone else needed it more.
I lump this story with that.
That magic box story sounds amazing. You'd like me to read it, wouldn't you? Please say yes. Please say you still have it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know; it feels like mourn over change of any kind in which the thing before the change and the thing after are both worth seeing, like moving from one place to another.
But people keep thinking they can't learn something new without losing something old, as though brains were attics . . . oh wait.
I DON'T KNOW IF I HAVE IT, JANELLE
ReplyDeletePLEASE HAVE IT. IT'S ABOUT MAGIC. IT WILL COME TO YOU.
ReplyDeletedude, I don't believe you about the blinking thing. I have never ever seen that. I have noticed flashes of light before WITHOUT blinking, but never from blinking. If I look at something for a while, sometimes I'll see flashes of light in the corner of my eyes, but never from blinking. I've seen patterns in the dark though.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe me about the blinking thing either.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry. I don't see it either.
I have seen that, though. It's very fast, though, and you can't really slow it down like he says you can unless you slow down time.
ReplyDelete