A Silent Spectrum
I could think of none as she stood before me, clearly waiting. My skin began crawling with tiny, sharp pin pricks – across my back, down my legs, and through my head at her rigid gaze. It felt like miniscule tears, ripping ever so slowly apart from one end to the other; I felt that she was trying to peel something open within me, illuminate a far off piece of memory to shed more light on her expectant form. However, I was inexplicably resistant, attempting to keep my mind together and clasp at whatever composed sense of self I had left despite being under her harsh scrutiny.
What found me then was also something foreign and strange. It was a creeping feeling, one that dwelled between the places of obscurity and anonymity; like the shallow, black tendrils that seemed to spread ever outward – slinking across the floor, the walls, everywhere, suffocating and covering things with a thick, shallow blanket – it pressed down and down and down on me until I had flattened and sunk as far as I could into myself.
Of every possible piece of prose in existence, such interlocking lines had swirled and condensed into themselves from within my mind, forming innumerable edges and curves. I traced familiar symbols, creating words from the patterns on the grotesque wallpaper around me; a mass of luminescent yellow swirls arose from a pale sea of blue, almost drowning itself within salty sea foam. The bubbles floated upward, so round and delicate, reflecting more and more wonderful shades. And I had followed with it, into a sea of luminescent color – shades of warm oranges and bursting yellows, a sweetness to the tip of the tongue. Rebounding off each other, the colors had floated too far above my grasp and left me altogether.
And here I was again, having snapped myself out of my reverie. I was still at a loss for words. It’s strange to think that the space between such metaphoric complexities, hidden twice over within another distant allegory, could only widen and distill itself so much. However, at that moment, I had none to speak of, not the slightest murmur or phonological coercion could be sounded to break that immeasurable silence between her and me.
She took me outside then, likely bored with my muteness, into the garden outside of the house that housed that room. There was suddenly a burst of green, a greenness that was greener than any green I could imagine – a verdant thrall of undergrowth and lumping foliage overhead. Amidst the grasses, there exploded a mosaic of blushing color: of crimson roses and timid pinks that shied away from the more violent violets.
She talked instead, saying that before everything will eventually fall into oblivion – me along with it – if we threw rocks up high enough, it will hit the surface of a blue, clouded eternity, and that snow will fall through the cracks. She described it as if there being a glass dome around the world, hovering above us that dyes the sky we see across a spectrum of soft blues, incandescent oranges, burning reds, and velvety blacks; the latter color would either be a true reflection of the wider universe beyond or a compact layer of ice that blocked out more luminescent colors. And if we break the glass, the cold darkness of space outside would seep through and shatter into snow.
When night came and the temperature dropped so low to solidify such blooming, verdant warmth, I took to a winter image and walked across a white, frozen expanse of grass; every step I took left a patch of that greener green after me. The pale frost swimming over it had crystallized in a complex pattern of immeasurable sides and corners, like a series of interlocking webs mixing into each other. It sparkled and glowed with such a blinding light that I somehow tasted the sunlight glinting off it; the warmth burnt itself into my skin through my thick fabric coat, smelling of a saccharine smoke, an exhaustive combustion of volcanic ash.
The garden was melting. The house was burning. She was gone, having decided to melt through the glass instead of breaking it. And sure enough, an ominous snow of black and gray hues had fallen through.
What came out of me then was a mess of unintelligible utterances; however, the black fumes had concentrated itself and slithered down to congeal itself inside my throat. Choking it out, I spoke once more, and only the dense, burning mass of darkness had responded back to my solitude. Crying out with greater fervor, I acted as if I could reach out across that wide expanse of night and touch her – that feeling of security, of safety, once again but found nothing.
I could do nothing.
But then I saw what was a dark figure just barely and hazily outlined by the gloomy and obscure haze within that yellow ocean.
And I left to find her within the burnt mass of color.
I breathed in a decrepit grayish rot, a decomposing cesspool of organic life all intermixed, all smarming amongst each other, buzzing and groaning with husky, dulled tones and then into a colorless cacophony of screeching agony. I could almost feel my skin slough away through the acrid, dull stench; a layer of me had dropped straight off, falling in fatty clumps of skin and blood on the floor. It morphed and bubbled, slipping across each other as the slickness of the greasy fluids eased it across the surface before dissolving up into a dreary smoke. Black, viscous ooze bloomed from the wounds, boiling over onto the rest of my body. The acidic smell of rot washed over me, causing me to gag and retch, burning itself in my throat.
I saw some shadow of her again, standing across from me within the dark obscurity, and I couldn’t help but utter the same mess of utterances I did before. But such semantics had become clearer the longer as I went on despite the smoke billowing up within me, hacking roughly at my ash-filled lungs. Despite this, I continued on until I dissolved altogether into such soft poetics. I took to a pattern of rhythmic symbolisms, of abstract inflections that was intensified within a modality of morphological processes and syntactic qualities thereafter. Through one proverbial clause to an unfamiliar one, reaching back to a referent one, I marked a sequential relation between where I stopped and she began.
When I spoke to her, I couldn’t help but wonder if she really heard. Because at every word she uttered, every chuckle and whimper, I could not say the same. Whenever I looked at her, I saw a bloom of color – of intrepid purples and screaming reds – that swam across the two of us. And when I reached to grasp other shades, I found them clenched so tightly around that loose part of her that they slipped away and escaped from me altogether.
But still, I found it so, so colorful being with her.
And so, falling silent yet again, I waited for her response.
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ANNIE WANG is a senior pursuing a Baccalaureate degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing. Annie is a student at UAA. She says she can write decently.