I'm doing 7 things
I wrote an essay that I enjoyed. This is a short story actually.
I.
Yellow sunlight reflects itself off the dandelions in the front yard, transforming the empty canvas white of the walls in my room into yellow wallpaper. What is not white in my room is green, as though yellow dandelions and blue sky had joined in marriage to create, out of their primariness, its secondariness.
That is to say that my room is secondary to the world, like my mind is secondary to reality. There are other minds that are primary. Those minds have primary thoughts, thoughts of blue without a yellow cast, and thoughts of yellow not prone to streaks of blue. In my mind, yellow and blue blend, always in different ratios, but always creating some shade of green. Even when my thoughts are at their yellowest, eye-dropper-sized amounts of blue are present. Although, to the naked eye, the yellow is untainted, my eye can feel the blue. Nothing is ever seen, always felt.
So, today, as I lie in bed, I see the yellow of the dandelions, but feel the ever-present green. Today, the only blue I see is in the sky. In my baby pictures, my eyes are blue. I can’t say it really happened, but I vaguely remember someone confirming this fact, as though that matters because the truth is that in all the photographs prior to age three, my eyes are blue. My eyes are green now, and I know this because I have seen them in the mirror in real-time. Pictures are frozen, so I feel like they can’t be trusted. Even so, I believe my eyes used to be blue, so that is enough truth. After all, what one believes becomes their truth, and eventually you start to see what you believe.
Maybe that’s confusing because I believe the dandelions are yellow and see them as such, but it is also widely known that dandelions are yellow. Dandelions are a growth-industry, perhaps the most recognizable weed, the foe of suburbanite gardeners who eradicate them to create green carpets that serve as a foil for the runners of cement that make up the driveways and roads which surround their houses like moats.
Men who maniacally water the lawn in their business suits are not gardeners. Anyone who does not understand the importance of weeds cannot be important to the universe. In other words, if you violently attack the earth so that monotony may reign supreme in your plot of land, then you do not deserve to own that plot of land.
And if you fight that war, you will not win because, every spring, a new army of dandelions, their yellow helmets glistening in the sun, will mount a surprise attack and you will have to kill them all over again. Dandelions can be suppressed, but they will always return, just like the leaves that return to the trees after the autumnal lack of sunlight suffocated the green and blew their brethren from the boughs.
The businessman has smothered contrast in his landscape. He has ripped out the offensive brilliance of certain deciduous shrubs and created, in its stead, rolling burms of soft-colored perennials to daintily complement the static sea of Astroturf-like grass in his yard. People will actually kill all the grass in their picnic-cloth-sized plots so that they may roll out lengths of sod that will always betray themselves by showing the hint of a seam. I call these homesteads, frankensteads.
From where I lie, I can see the seams of my duvet. I sewed it by hand and the green vines that twine themselves on the white fabric do not meet up. That is how I know they are not real. That is how I know that, at least for today, the wild talons of the woodland flora have not conspired to kill me. I wonder, though, that if I believed they were strangling me, pushing me down into the dirt of my grave, if then I would see that and that would be my reality even if I didn’t want it that way. It may be that you must trust that you will not believe what you don’t want to see. But, can a mind be trusted?
When I was little, I was afraid of a noisy generator in the shop below our apartment. I would often cry out, “Mommy, there’s a machime in my closet.” I believed it was there, but I never saw it.
Now, it is the noise inside my brain that I fear. It is not an industrial noise, but an organic one. Rather than fearing my surroundings, as I did when I was a child, now I fear my insides. Somehow, I imagine myself capable of greater injury than any outside force.
II.
Rather than lie here and pretend that I am absorbed in some train of thought, I will immediately own up to the fact that I have lovingly pinned each of my thoughts to the backs of hyperactive bees that are urgently buzzing about inconsistently, involving me in their chaotic happiness, only to come back, release their stingers into my flesh, and die. Mostly, bees seem to die on the wrong side of some partition, usually the glass of a rear car window or the mesh of a screen. To me, they look like ideas that never made it to fruition, ideas that met a barricade and gave up or just ran out of steam. In my case, ideas buss around in all their glory until they reveal their dark side, and then the ideas, which had henceforth given so much pleasure, provided so much clarity, and promised so much potentiality, sting me and die.
Outside my window, bees have colonized the defunct bird feeder dangling from the crook of an iron plant hanger. Staked into the ground so that it leans slightly to one side (either right or left, depending on where you stand), the iron pole is just about my height, and the cylindrical plexi-glass of the feeder provides a clear view of honeycombs massed together like gray matter.
Bees in twos or threes are not a threat to me. In such small numbers, they always seem like peaceful, detail-oriented workers, comically buzzing in my peripheral vision. The air vibrations created from their steadily flapping wings, tickle my skin. I imagine the bees muttering a faint, undetectable “pardon me” as they zip through my airspace.
It is hard for me to reconcile my cordial relationships with these individuals with the serious threat that I sense when I come upon their queendom. Suddenly, I am not in my own yard, but in a territory that has violently seceded from the union of nature. They are frantic in their anger and unapologetic in their anti-neighbor policy.
Hundreds of single buzzing beings blend together to create a unified body whose muzzle pulls back to reveal fangs dripping with fire, and who sharpens its claws, preparing to fight to the death-obviously mine. I have been told that on cool nights the yellow beast sleeps. I will not disturb it because, even in its anesthetized state, the beast is still mighty, and I am afraid to deprive the world of its will.
