Snapshot Elemental

I'm not really a part of this world. Not in the sense most can relate to. It's like someone painted two pictures of totally different places. One of these is vague and interpretive, all curves and colour, and the other is sharp, fixed and exact. I am from the first. Someone went to it with a big pair of scissors and started cutting out its pieces, and I was one of those. Then they went to the other painting. They took a large glob of glue and pasted me over it. Mayhaps their intention was for the worlds to fuse together and compliment one another.

But it didn't work. The styles were too different, and no matter how strong the glue was, I haven't fully attached to the painting of Earth. There's this line between us. Everything happens around me, and passes through me. I get the impression it shouldn't be like that. Bits and pieces need to mix together for it to be real.

Another party last night. A twenty-first. A rush of music and smoke and spilt beer swirling around me, and dusk. Such a beautiful dusk.

There are storm clouds and rain clouds sailing above us, and I stand staring at them, reading a story playing out in a language I have never learned. Greyscales on floundering sky-fish. Quicksilver bubbling slowly, swirling down a plughole.

I watch the sun die. The clouds are red with sulfur. Oily yellow explosions kick up charred clouds on the horizon. I watch the glow fading, a candlewick gulped down by a mirari of coalesced wax. I close my eyes and watch it again and again.

The clouds break a little and offer a glimpse of the most gorgeous blue. If blood were blue, it would be this exact broth of shades. Curled up in the darkened pool above me is an albino sky-shrimp, decaying as the air currents tear at its edges. I watch it as it dissipates forever. The canvas is wiped clear by a miniature storm. The rain has come at last.

I take in deep breaths and clear the dust and ash from my tired lungs. It has been so long since I last stood in the rain, I can't remember. But now that it's here, I can't imagine being without it. People congregate under the covered patio in a daze of smoke and alcohol, and I cannot stand to be next to them for long before my skin dries out and I start burning, as though I am standing too close to a fire. I plunge myself repeatedly into the rain, as desperately addicted to the feel of its cool fingers shoved down my throat as I imagine others are to the brimstone glee of cigarettes. We aren't any different, them and me. We just live on polar worlds. Water is my fire, air is my earth.

I meander. I have few conversations that last longer than a minute. I count out the length of the patio. 13 steps, heel-to-toe. I close my eyes and make these thirteen steps many times, trying to keep my eyes closed and trust my feet not to send me crashing into a wall or tumbling down the steps which await the fourteenth footfall. My mind throws up barricades that make me open my eyes. It strikes me that even with my eyes closed I know the difference between solid matter and open space: not just that an impediment is there, but the form it takes. I file this away for further experimentation.

I read my book on the freezing, rain-speckled lawn. I lie back and watch the stars, thinking that somewhere out there is my own world, where fire is water and air is earth.

Somewhere in the middle of these solitary sojourns I find myself sitting next to a friend, and we chat a while, though the words pass over me as they tend to do. I can't remember them. Only three come to mind now, spoken sheepishly, almost like an apology:

“I'm not happy.”

And I shrug. “Who is?” I reply rhetorically. But I don't believe the implied answer. I believe there are happy people out there. Some of them may not know they are, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter.

But hellfire knows I can't offer advice. I can't say 'That's okay', or 'It will change', or 'This will make it better'.

A circle quickly builds up next to me, a game of Kings, a little blazing, a splash of beer. I feel a little like a melanoma, flapping loosely at the edge of the group. And I think, burn it up. If you can't make it better, make it worse. Make it different. Escape to anywhere but here, and then crawl back the next morning.

Don't let appearances deceive you. We may be freezing our asses off on stone pavement, under a bitter sky with the nickering of beer pong in the background, breathing in an ether of weed and tobacco, but I'm at a cocktail party.

Surrounded by human Molotovs.

I peel myself away, slippery as ice, sliding to a bed somewhere across the city. I wash myself in a cleansing waterfall, pulling the last of the ash off my skin, and I slip off to bed, lying somewhere above the worlds as they spin beneath me.