Layers deeper

Layers deeper, through all of the apartments that painted away your memories with colours of paint, each time more inappropriate than the last when you find flecks beneath your fingernails at night, away from any apartments, the colours flake off and dust the night. The past is inevitable. Your past is not. The startling calm blue of sky over dull beige buildings, taupe, lemon, green sea grasses turning black through thick deep water, hot stucco red, and mauve are borne indirectly, transparent and luminous, from the surface of the rippling water. The colours tile your glistening open eyes. You are not waiting for shadows now; you are waiting for hands. Nothing moves, nothing moves forward. Across your eye the colours tile into different domestic lineages. Red before mauve, yellow over taupe, each ending in still white washing over both cold eyes.