Irridescence

My eyes cracked open and lifted me so viciously from my dreams last night. Rather addled, I found out that darkness still engulfed me when I woke up. I felt strangely comforted in that bed of obscurity... just like I imagine all of the vicious, nocturnal beasts that live in children's nightmares would feel. I contemplated my surroundings a little longer... though it really didn't take much to do so.

Complete darkness.

It was an absolution of blackness. Totally devoid of light. Once more my mind reeled in the thought of the creatures within children's minds. I wondered if they had ever seen themselves as they truly were. Perhaps not what they really were, but at least their shape... did they really think themselves that scary? I've always thought that the most frightening creatures are frightened themselves. I was losing track of what I was thinking of, as usual... as I began to lose myself in this world of monstrosities that lived in human offspring's heads.

I observed as I streched my arms out... only to not feel anything... the depravation of senses astounded my imagination in such a marvellous way. I was dumbfounded as I just drifted in my mind... so lucid but at the same time so weary from waking up in such an alien environment that i'm used to. I could feel every little vein within me and every single nerve tingle in anticipation of something... anything that my obstruct my voyage into this obsidian realm.

Suddenly I felt something climb unto my feet and start nibbling and shuffling around upon it. At first I was frightened, not knowing what was there when I suddenly remembered...

...Lazarus.

A faint, insignificant and squeaky meow confirmed my suspicions. Indeed, it was Lazarus... and she was probably meddling around with me given that I had just awakened from a half-slumber that I didn't really get to enjoy completely. What was I dreaming about anyway? It didn't seem to matter at the moment. Especially when I had a mischievous cat trying to box with my feet.

"Mrrrrrrrreow!", she spoke again, only this time it was significantly louder than before. Under the new protest of Lazarus' incessant meowing, every one of my senses felt shattered, broken and interrupted. As if I could suddenly everything that was around me, the harmony that she broke made me once more return to a land that I was all too familiar with. I looked around and saw that the darkness had lifted to a degree... and I couldn't feel the perpetually dark persence swallow me whole as it had before. But still... my room felt... different. I don't know how I could plainly describe it... like trying to describe what water tastes like. Or better yet, describing the difference between what different waters taste like.

But enough of those allusions that i'm pretty sure that not many will understand... even I didn't understand them at the moment. I just felt like something was missing or placed upon something that had been there before. I saw Lazarus' silhouette upon the foot of my bed, idly swishing her tail from side to side, looking at me with her amber eyes gleaming with the feline intelligence that I couldn't comprehend directly, even though I felt a spark of comprehension within her... and it seemed to me as if she knew what I was thinking about in that moment.

"Alright Lazarus, quit foolin' around and let's get some chow", I told her, giving in to the illusion that she understood my spoken language. Truth was, I didn't really feel like eating. It was just another one of those automated reactions that go on within the circuitry of my body when something feels... "off". Think of it as a fail-safe mechanism, though nothing as terminal as that. I had grown accustomed to calling my cat Lazarus, even though it was obvious that name didn't really suit her. Primarily because of her gender. To be honest, it really matters little to me now why I "baptized" her with that name... it's just grown on me, I guess.

I stood up and felt the cold air of my room fill my lungs once more... knowing now that I hadn't precisely felt this a few moments ago... when I was stuck in limbo, or something of the sort. That negative space within my mind still intrigued me... and I somehow knew this night was not to be over until I knew about it more than I did now. My bare feet caught the chill of the tiles on the floor with a rather allergic reaction. They didn't like the temperature at all, but I could care less at the moment. I was a corpse recieving too many stimuli for my own good at the moment. To yet again place another facade on my motives, I decided to make my way into the kitchen, even though I was absolutely certain I wasn't going to eat anything... I was subjected to my words as a marionnette is subjected to the strings attached to the puppetteer's hands... lacking of will and not being able to do much to get out of their grasp.

I mindlessly glided along the corridor on my way to the kitchen, not taking the time to so much as look at the surroundings that I was currently in. For all I knew at the moment, I could've been traversing yet another dungeon I had seen an infinite number of times in any videogame I might've played or any story I might've read. But I was too oblivious to even care at the time. I didn't even know if Lazarus was following me around or not... all that was in my mind was just getting this over with... and remembering what it was like to feel nothing.

After what seemed to be an entire era of drifting through my mind, I finally reached the kitchen and my hand instinctively rose to flick on the switch that gave me the power to create light out of electric currents that ran through tubes of a glass-like material that hung suspended in the roof of my apartment... but then again, that was just another useless piece of information I learned from my electronics period. As surely as any ancient bulbs would've done, the lights slowly flickered on in a spasm of luminescence the ran through every filament of the bulb, giving them this strobe effect that I used to hate in my childhood... but suddenly grew to love the closer I became to becoming an adult... a term that I still hate to this day, mind you. As the first little rays of light from the strobing sources of whiteness began to enter my eyes, a crackle of electricity seemed to invade my nerves...

I strangely felt another familiar presence... or should I say... I felt a familiar LACK of presence. Once the lights finally obtained a uniform behavior, I just stood there... bleak... motionless... and alone. Once more the feeling of nothingness began to take me within its fold... and in one single, graceful motion I felt the strings of my puppetmaster be cut... and allow myself to freefall into that which I wanted to feel... which I wanted to dive deeper into.

In here... well, my words begin to lose meaning, really. How can I explain that I was standing before my kitchen door and suddenly I was pulled into this realm in which I felt everything become an absolution of itself? I don't feel that I have the ability to do so... and in that moment, I felt that I had lost every ability I had, for that matter. The void that I felt within the pit of my stomach was so vast... so strong... I felt as if though I was going to tur into a black hole. My mass suddenly crushing against its own weight and swallowing me inside-out... but I was probably thinking too much at the moment.  Which is what I felt immediately after I grasped the entirety of what I knew I was experiencing.

I felt like such a fool for not having stopped to think earlier. I felt so empty inside... and now I knew that everything that I once lived for was gone. Or I had let go of it. I had let go of myself... and now I was just a shell wandering along life with no purpose, no strength... no resolve and no challenges. The sickly, grimy substance that I knew as guilt began to overwhelm me... drowning me in my own pathetic sorrows as the tears flooded my eyes. The wild beasts and the demons that I kept shackeled rattled their chains in desperation. Screaming inside the nothingness that I ruled over. Anger then wracked my mind and I felt the boundaries inside of my body begin to crack and strain under the pressure of the rage that had invaded me... which then was smothered with the hopelesness of the whole situation.

It felt like a war everywhere I looked. I saw conflicts that had been raging within me and within every human being since the very stars were born. The whole theater of battle shimmering before me in a strangely beautiful and shimmering light... everything a reflection of one another... and the hollowness that invaded each entity now that they were separate... incomplete... and striving to put themselves above the other. In the midst of this fantastic battle that took place, a single familiar figure stood in the middle. Just as I did... it stood dumbfounded as it looked around itself to see the chaos that was ensuing. It seemed to act as if though I wasn't there... and come to think of it... so did everything else in this space in which I was being pulled into.

Yet... as it glanced its visage before me, I felt as if though it was looking right through me... into me and within me. And at once, I felt its gleam within my mind... within my eyes... within my heart... and this infinite ocean that lay before me in complete chaos grinded to a halt... leaving me to float in its gentle waves under the pale light of my own conciousness...

"Meow", I heard once again.

I turned to look at there she was again... Lazarus... eyeing at me curiously with her fiendishly and compassionately intelligent eyes.

The kitchen. Just as I knew it. Bathed in the drab fluorescence that my kitchen lights seem to have. A screaming beacon of nothingness in this dark home. It was an intruder... and I didn't want to be here.

"You're right, Lazarus... I don't want to be here", I spoke to myself more than to her. And in some way, i'm pretty sure that she knew I was talking to myself more than I was to her. I then abused my power once more to mystically create and destroy light in glass-like tubes by raising my hand and commanding the lights to go off. They just disappeared... no fancy fading, no clues of permanence, nothing. They just blinked out in a rather unspectacular fashion. It felt as if though they just didn't care for staying a little longer... and in some ways I hated that... but in some other ways I preferred it. Tonight... it was of preference.

I made my way back to my room... but this time I felt as if though I had a real incentive to do so... I felt determined, in some way... to do what, I do not know... but it mattered little. The fact was I felt that I was deliberating my actions. Once more I entered the haven that I had always built for myself... and strangely I decided not to return to bed immediately, but rather... I sat in front of my computer... as insipid and willing as always, and turned it on.

The ritualistic patterns appeared in the monitor... and things that I had seen one too many times showed themselves before me once more.. but it wasn't in my interest to stop to look at them. I just simply blazed through them... and finally reached the main desktop screen. The xenomorphic face that has been there for years greeted me once again with its vicious grimace... which always made me smile in the stupidest way imaginable. Barring that little detail... I dove into the memory banks of the box... searching for something... something that seemed as if though it needed to be unearthed.

Strangely enough... there it was... as brilliant as ever... like a buried treasure, I felt such a tranquility fill me when I got to touch it... to merely look at it... and know that it's there before me, free from all of the dirt that it was buried in. But it wasn't just something that I had found there... no... this was just an object. I had found a deep sense of self within it... and a remembrance that I had thought that I had lost within the waves of the seas that raged within me... waves that that night... I was hoping to drift in within my dreams.

I felt the blood flowing through my veins once more... and felt the air swirl around me and go into my lungs with a new life instilled within. I didn't know exactly what to make of it... and I still don't really know what to make of all of that... but I know that it has always meant so much to me... only that I never really admitted it to myself... my inspiration... my insight... and the time that i've always held so dearly with it. And better yet... to realize that I still live with it... and that it is something that is me now... something that I felt within the figure that penetrated every sense of mine within my mind...

I turned everything off... allowing the darkness to shroud my room again... muting out all of the noises that I had once before placed upon myself... and enjoying the silence of slumber... and the tranquility of acceptance... and the shimmering grace of her brilliant irridescence.

"Meow", Lazarus decided to quietly say before drifting off into that dream once again...
Which i'll never remember what it was, anyway.



"Thank you for letting me fall in love with life again..."