Screw Your Eyes Shut (Elephant, Remote, Water, Interrogation, Backpack)

Screw your eyes shut. Screw them shut as tight as you can, till your nose wrinkles and you can feel lines appearing and deepening on your chin. Now raise your first two fingers, nearest the thumb on each hand and press them over your closed eyes. Let your fingers be the gold coins of the ancient corpses of kings, so your fingertips can feel every ridge of bone, the lacrimal, the zygomatic, the ethmoid, the temporal.

At first it will be all black, and your eyes will start to water a little. Suddenly, you will have flashes of bright white light, little waves of interrogation lights. And red distress signals, out on the dark dark seas of your sight. And even more suddenly Things will come into focus. You will see pictures you have never seen before, Things you dream of in the dark dark recesses of your mind, dreams spiked with drink and drugs and the endless party that was rock’n’roll, dreams that you thought you’d never dream again.

I saw God once. I saw the sea, an expanse of ever-changing silk, and a swimmer, not waving but drowning, and too remote for me to hear his cries. I saw Anne Frank, eternally young trapped in the pages of a diary in a Harry Potteresque world where the dead can live. I saw an elephant, raising its trunk to the water, and a sunflower raising its head to the sun. I saw a pair of hikers, carrying sleeping bags and a backpack and a bedroll, climbing a slope that was littered with muddied snow, under the low glare of the malevolently red sun.

I saw, I saw, I saw.

And then you take away your fingers, and you open your eyes, and you cannot see, and the real world is blurred and fuzzy. It is not good to stray too far into the realm of the undiscovered, and every voyage takes you further out to the remote waves where, like the swimmer, you are too far from solid ground on both the x and the y axis for anyone to hear you calling out at all.

~Bella B is 15 years old, blogs sporadically at theflyingpen.blogspot.com, and believes that the mundane is more interesting than the remarkable if it's told properly.