Okay, I've just finished the dang "Typewriter" blah and I get started on a new post...talk about making up for lost time. In fact I typed this "essay-story" about A Sweet, Dull Pain a few days back and have only just though of posting it now. Basically it talks about why I decided to write and A Sweet, Dull Pain and how the idea came to be. Really just a general working of my mind...and I find it a bit verbose. Still, it's pretty much just an update. I hope you can read the font, which is urania_czech, a typewriter font I'm quite taken with. Ping me if you can't.
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The Story Behind A Sweet, Dull Pain
Not much of a view, really. I very rarely look out the window, especially this one. In fact, I very rarely look out windows if there is nothing there to see...unless I'm thinking. Something about the vast blue expanse through the panes of glass suggests thought. I like big windows for that reason, windows I can see through without having to stand so close to the glass that I feel like, at any moment, I could jump.
I don't think about jumping. I don't really contemplate death. Sometimes I contemplate the abstract nature of it, but not really death as an option. It's not that I have a lot to live for – mostly life's a day-to-day thing for me – but I don't really have any reason to die. There's no emptiness, no numbness, none of the cliché reasons to end it all. But whenever I look down through a huge window, something rises up inside me and I start to wonder...how would it be like on the way down?
They call them picture windows because when you stand at one of them, you look good enough to take a picture of. It's a cliché, yet very evocative pose – standing at a huge window and looking towards the sky, as if it is full of limitless possibilities.
But back to the present. Back to my dirty fingers parting dirty blinds to look through a dirty window. I'm doing this at random, to think. Around me, people are talking and laughing and walking around. It's as if at the window I can become absolutely invisible. Not that I mind. I usually enjoy attention but at this point, a little alone-ness could do me some good. It helps me think, and when I activate that part of my brain, thoughts bubble up to the surface as if they have been waiting for an eternity for me to loose them. Nothing really profound, however amusing. I could just pick a thought and let it lull me into a false sense of security in the fact that I am thinking. Just follow a train of thought into oblivion, for all I care.
The sunlight hits my eyes with a vengeance. It's strange...it's not early morning, it's late afternoon. My eyes have been in the light for at least eight hours. Yet the light hurts as if I've opened my eyes for the first time, just as my hand tingles as if someone has just squeezed it and let go. Every sensation coalesces into a feeling that confusingly means that I have either gained or lost something. I’ve been staring at the light for too long that black spots begin to float in front of my eyes. It’s nothing new, they fade in and out of vision from time to time.
I sigh and begin to close my eyes but a part of me calls my senses into alarm and they snap open, wide open, again. The sunlight is slowly turning from blazing yellow to a warm gold, streaks of it tickling my cheeks with warmth. Trains of thought weave in and out of my head but I can’t be tempted to dawdle on any of them. The ache in the back of my eyes – the back of my head – builds and wanes, each flash bringing it back. It is a dull pain, drumming in the back of my head and coming to nothing in the end. Pain is supposed to be a reminder, a warning. This pain seems as meaningless as the gesture that brought it about.
Staring at a landscape through a dirty window, Venetian blinds parted with fingers that sorely need a washing.
I move my eyes to the corner of the window, away from a cheerless view. It catches sight of the metal framework that creates the shutters of the window, painted strips of iron or steel – I cannot tell – that protect us from the elements but seem so fragile as I look at them. Dust has collected in the pockets of space between metal and glass. I wonder if enough dust collected, could it sufficiently push the panes out to sail down to the street below?
There it is…falling again. If not me, then a pane of glass. The sunlight can still find my eyes, even though they are turned away from the source of it. I stand there, at the window, in silence. It has only been a few seconds since I pried through the blinds…and it feels like it, but it also feels as if I have been standing there, frozen, for hours. Staring at nothing and thinking about nothing. Strange how so purposeless an exercise can evoke so many different words.
A ribbon of light catches a stone on one of my bracelets, and instantly the light is shattered – so dramatic – into millions of colorful rhombuses that dance on the cream-green wall. Hot pink, aqua blue, violent violet, and neon green slivers narrow and widen with each move of my hand. It’s been a long time since I’ve been fascinated by how light breaks into many colors, my first memory of it being a time when I pranced around in a purple shirt and matching jeans, studded with sequins that caught the light and caused the effect I see once again.
Finally, I tear my eyes away. I look back at the room that seemed so crowded when I was looking away from it but now seems almost deserted. Spots of yellow flash before my eyes, as if the sunlight is seeking vengeance for my turning away from it. I feel dizzy, for a moment, and touch my temple. The pain is back, throbbing hazily through my brain. I find I quite like the pain, despite my aversion to the sensation in general. It is a dull, thought-provoking ache that makes me feel as if I have lost and gained something. In a few seconds of damaging my eyes I have conjured up a phrase that seems utterly meaningless but absolutely haunting.
As I play the phrase over and over in my head, I know that it and what it promises will haunt me. I will wander around, grasping at storylines and characters, muses and methods, so I can fulfill its cause. It will cause me annoyance, misery…but I will not be able to stop talking about it. A part of me is afraid that it will join the ranks of the titles I never used, though they sounded so beautiful and held so much promise. It is that fear that drives me into a frenzy trying to call up plotlines for it, in service to it. One that sounds good one day sounds too cliché the next.
But I know how it will begin. It will begin the same way I began – staring out of a dirty window at a sun that had not yet chosen between setting and hanging clear and large in the sky. It will begin with an ache that builds at the base of one’s head and travels to the backs of ones eyes...a pain that is all at once annoying and addictive.
A Sweet, Dull Pain.
Basically it's just an update in essay/story form. I don't think this classifies as "autobiographical incident", seeing as some of it has been romanticized and fictionalized.
Funny thought. When reading the purposefully run-on sentence "Staring at a landscape through a dirty window, Venetian blinds parted with fingers that sorely need a washing." I thought of a person called Venetian Blinds who parted (a.k.a. lost) his/her dirty fingers. It's a funny double meaning, actually.
Anyway, that's all the write I have in me at the moment.
XOXO,
NC
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