the purest white
He turns to friends; he is amongst many in this cavern, dingily filled with brightly coloured morsels, presented on pewtered platinum platters, edged with spraypainted plastic green fringing, inappropriate fruit slices and what look like glace cherries, soaked in sugar syrups, sucrose sweet and shiny. The friends. They wanted to visit once more to become dulled by monosodium glutamate longings in a grocery shop - like the type you pretend you work in when a child - selling hollow plastic limes, lemons and oranges.
[We only sell bitter citrus here. None of that strawberry twaddle. Cutting, scathing, scaldingly sharp. Wits and sarcasm. Serrated.]
He turns to friends and sees people. People glimpsed through a silkscreen. Their own outline a trick of the light, performed by the most evocative lies of smoke and mirrors, a teasing presence which can only be felt as heat evaporating from skin. Not seen and not heard. A guess of a ghost somewhere. But the waiting staff do not notice; they continue to go about their blankfaced daily business, removing plates and chinking glasses with cutlery spilling out from arms, chiming as spoons chide the white tiled floor.
[the stains on the coarse grout spoke in otherword stories, but he whispered to them; pleaded with them not to relate their tales today.]
He turns to friends and opens his mouth to speak but is found in another room, sat in front of busy buzzing screens, pressurized to finish the tasks being pulverised in the food blender to a smooth sludge. Unfazed, he opens the lid, takes out the mulched, spinning papers and sews their words and pictures back together, concentrating at precisely the correct instant, piercing and stitching, weaving and determinedly creating. Next task, please.
[Even though all he can see is brick, concrete and glass with a tiny yelp of sky, he is comfortable in the chaos of constrictive construction.]
He turns to friends to find the one remaining. The boy who knows no black. He’ll walk across sunnily dewy paving slabs through the myriad roads in a city threatening to eat him whole, yet he casts no shadow upon their mettle. When he places step after step in waterlogged earth, his footprints wash away leaving no trail, no confirmation of his existence. He cannot see in the dark, but uses his mind’s torch to view night as day. He is frequently lost for words. He cannot hate anybody, anyone, anything. He only knows white; he can hear the grey hisses but rids them of their darkness to a lighter hue.
He will keep senses open to hear and process; to separate this from that, and present from past, and present the results in stilted fashion, stuttered from calloused hands as pixel squeaks leak from his palms. In his own indescribable way, he exists, creates and digests. Speaks in brights and whites.
Black does not exist. Not to him. He dazzles eyes and minds with foreverlight.
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