Stefan Zweig
~
A melody of subtle happiness travels in floating musical notes around the center of my eyesight in a masquerade of invisible birds and planes falling into shreds of feathers and paper, settling on a heart that beats pain and anger disguised in a helpless symphony of sadness.
One, a shortness of breath. Two, an echo of a dying heartbeat. Three, a mind beheaded by confused and elusive variables with the constant ax of pain. Four, her eyes were once full with the depth and breadth of life. Five, her eyes are now a broken portal to a non-existent dimension. Six, flowers wither. Seven, flowers wither. Eight, flowers wither. Nine, number-shaped bullets shoot the music down.
Discrete hands softly encircle the kitchen clock that makes up her neck. She can't tell the time because it's hiding beneath her throat, face down. But her breath smells like seconds. And the focus shifts from the heaviness of chest pain to that of a headache as a single minute dives through her blink and into her swallowed pride. This clock is broken - it lost its parts in a battle against time. This clock is broken - and her discrete hands were not her own. This clock is broken - and it took them thirty-one blinks to slowly slit her throat.
Maybe things don't need to make sense.
But assuming that things do make sense. Perhaps I'm seeing you through multi-shaded spectacles, with thick lenses stuck between the color of your soul painting its outer layers and the faded hue of mine lingering on the worn-out interior. Maybe everything happens inside the lens and everything else is just the illusory reaction of the universe. Maybe we should all take off our glasses to see things for how they truly are, how we are all one. But then again, we are not all one. We are free to become whoever we want to be. Whether you want to be a jet black anti-hero or a desert gold victim, a greenish maroon protector or a blood red mercenary, whether you're a frozen ocean blue that paints paralyzed waves or the fiery purple privilege of the night sky, whether you're the most broken grey of all or the light-ray that only made it to grey blocks of letters, we are not one. We are many and each one of us must discover his own true color, dip that dry, unused, magical brush in it and finally get to paint beneath and beyond the borders of this line drawing they call 'life'.
So to each her own passion, his own poison, her lying truths, his truthful lies, the moments that meant so much to her though they never really happened and the moments that shaped the edges of his bed while she was half asleep. Reality recurrently dies at an alternating frequency. Yet the Truth is right there, at every corner and every turn, in every wave and every curl, engraved on the heart of the hero, and questioned in the mind of the weak. So send apologies to the ego of every weak hero because they forgot their introspective glasses in the house. And send flare signals for every starving existentialist who's writing stories with the crumbs that were supposed to take him home.
The ice, it either melts or breaks. And the same goes for glass. So whatever you're made of, sooner or later, you will stand in the middle of the line that joins your melting point and your breaking point. And in a moment of momentous divergence, you will make your move.
'Who you were, who you are, and who you want to be,' that's seven-dimensional chess with three demons and an extra player you cannot see. We are not all one. We are the seven that only become one after twenty-one handshakes, two broken mirrors, and a one-in-a-million mixture of humility and courage.
So blessed be the titans and the knights of honor that unknowingly know the difference between a game of chess and a set of drums.
And blessed be the brave.
~
"You've gotta find your big, gigantic drum kit."
Nick Andopolis