Jonathan Safran Foer
~
The walls were deep dark purple. The door was grey on the inside and it was open. The room was empty. The wooden floor carried the scent of burnt-out stars and I was sitting there by the corner. There were no windows. The ceiling was made of reflective ice and it became blurry whenever I pictured the faces of the people I loved. It was all fiction. It was safe fiction, and so was I.
He could enumerate his complexes in non-alphabetical order and compare the sum of the numerical values, corresponding to each of the starting letters, to the difference in salinity between the left eyelashes and the right ones. He could write this whole damn spectacle in an equation and solve it with his eyes closed but he could never apply the result. He could always tell the difference between arrogance and despair, lurking in the spaces between the lines, trembling in the tells beneath the lies, and sending him back to bed, where all dreams lie broken, dead, unread.
I can't tell you where it all went wrong even I wanted to. I can write it down in patterns and maps across the infinite realm of metaphors. I can't remember when exactly it all broke down and I'm not even sure I want to. I can breathe out smoke and become skin but it seems that I was built to do it the other way around. I can't say that I can do whatever I set my mind to - not anymore. I can tell you how you feel. You can break these chains whenever you want to. You can break them; and timing is key.
But the door is open, remember? How would it feel to be open door to an empty room?
Maybe the truth - the attainable one - lies in the distance between fiction and reality, time and timing, freedom and necessity, hope and despair, between the finite and the infinite, the eternal and the temporal, the sickness and the remedy, and, maybe, between the left eye that reads the lies and the right one that sees through them. And maybe the sum of all these distances will one day become you.
I don't like labels but I think all human beings are delusional. And the grandest delusion of them all is when we make the slightest smile of all, the smile that thinks it understands what it just read, what it just said, though it neither sees beyond the wine nor tastes the heartbroken bread.
The point is that, that there is this veil. The point is right there, right behind the veil. That's why everything you see, everything you see is always asking you the same question, here and here and there: What do you see? What do you see? What do you see?
[...]
Once, there were dreams and then, there were none. Twice and thrice, I faked and faded,
Maybe it's time I take my best shot.
The walls are still the same, though a lot of people have tagged their names and left. The door is maroon-black on the outside and it's closed shut. But it's still fiction out here. And I can't wait till you see the invisible paint I have on my face.
Maybe the truth is in the difference between these colors we exchange and all those we keep to ourselves.
I'm sorry I ran out of colors.
~
“Think of what starlight
And lamplight would lack
Diamonds and fireflies
If they couldn’t lean against Black...”
Mary O'Neill