You lose
You lose your cadence. You lose the sequence of colors that allows one setting to connect with the next. In the windowless room, with no vantage point, the colors pass before your eyes, yellow, grey, black, white, green, rose, rose, white, black, black, orange, blue, red, yellow, grey, green, black, violet, violet. After they line up they happen again, walking in a loop from street to street or staring into the blank wall of the apartment. You find yourself staying up into the night, partially awake, but upright, staring into the historical smoothness of the blank wall. It is only to stay awake, to let the sequence of colors keep playing out. It is not out of love for life, for the saturation of time, but a rot that lingers from the day that has degraded your capacity to change into a sleeper, or a walker, it stills you without aim or identity and over the greater sequence of nights it has encrusted your apartment with sifted out throngs of unidentifiable filler. You have forgotten all of origin stories. They dont have origins that connect with your life. When you look across them you feel your life beginning. They just accumulated and whether they were gone or multiplied you wouldnt sleep or want. You find out very late that there is nothing about you of consequence. You stand up infrequently and round the apartment checking the collection in the tableau for some kind of change, some layer of age that has been peeled away to reveal the real thing inside it. You look to see if anything has moved, if someone else has been there during the day to rotate one of the candle votive, perfume bottles, mugs or table lamps in the dust. You are concerned about circular things. You feel the night in the roof of your mouth. Another windowless room. It could be night or day. The follicles of hair on your scalp ache from being flattened against a high backed arm chair and your neck tingles. Everything that happens to you comes from within. Where else could it originate. There is nothing beyond these dark walls, more dark walls and an endless dusty floor. Your toes throb and your calves tighten; your spine atrophies. The last color is white and it sticks. Everything around you is caught. Your skin and flesh are inert packed sand in a particulate atmosphere of lamplight. Your breath is everywhere. It is caught up around you and your face sweats, your clothes bind over clothes against your skin in increasingly damp layers and you struggle, but grow numb. It isnt a process, it is merely a state. If you could control it this would be the instant of your corporeal birth. It is every morning the distraction that hides the auroral instant, and again the weight of day and where it keeps you. Each day your body goes. Where do you go. Where are you.
There is too much around you. The higher you walk the further out into the distance you see, it is too big, too still to fit you, into the morning sky, green for an instant, from the right side of the sky to the left in a flash across the top of the ridge of hills and then it is white an empty unchanging morning fills half of the world. It is filled or empty, but completely one or the other; it is unambiguous. It is full of something uselessly beautiful. Everything doesnt come to this point. All of the city is still laid out beneath this section of sky, still happening, or left alone, sealed and covered, or forgotten, untethered to now. On your back in gravel, or sand, or dry grass it becomes all at the crest of the hill sweeping away to nothing and the luminous white sky reaches around your body, and another day claims you.
