A Dark Spring
The artist hasn’t seen light in seven days.
All her memories are of a dark universe—it is dark out there, isn’t it? Out there in scouring space, an infinite badlands of gas and fire, giants of sound and subatomic ghosts—all of it lurking on in palpable confusion. Cold. Heat. Death.
An increasingly-complex network of borderlands, crossroads, knots. Roads of reality twisted and crashing—destination and destiny riven by reason, the illogic blood of paradox still pulsing a purpose it is programmed to pretend and play out.
Don’t cry, you artist. The light may come back someday. Speak to you of its secret waves.
She hears a little more every time—that secret code which cells communicate to each other, for how to be and why to do it. Changing all the time; never the same key twice. Cryptography of creation, passed on as rumors of ruin and the gift of gossip.
On her finger, an old scar of scarlet hue. Back when she was master of color. And when she transformed walls to galaxies of her own—each brush, stroke, confession.
She tongues it—a common atrophy and raw dust. Then it is gone. Inspiration is a stain soon erased, indecisively. Like lightbeams through an open door.
Pretty. Playful. Purposeless.
The artist is not herself.
In the bathroom, she stares into a mirror. Reflection of a broken view. The sides of her face drooping—clay undoing itself. They fall to the floor in blobs of beauty, smeared in every shade of the face, from sunny-day nostalgia to rainy-night remorse. So much to make of it.
But she steps on it, crushing those memories, those portraits of persons, with their names etched in spiteful ink, always remembering how much they hurt to bind to her body. And there she is, a doll, assembled in a haze, with arms missing and hair the wrong way—but she is there, glowing like she fits—finally she fits somewhere!
She belongs to be young again. To have a spirit on your shoulder, reminding you of your true path—your true you.
Hindsight is as haunting as any trauma. Still, it is not enough.
The artist just can’t feel like herself tonight.
So she craves the only way out. She finds her crafter’s scissors, a symbol of creative destruction—the collage of entropy. Her nervous nerves are burned by numbness, frozen by apathy. Carelessly, she sets up her ritual.
But there are no contentions from the heavens, endless and dark as they are. And she whispers for the Muses to look down upon her from their cloudy voids—to see her sacrifice their own gift to her, not returning it, but offering it.
She kisses the lips of her scissors against her wrist, an edge flirting with her freckling touch. Then she gazes upward, hands still as an altar, her voice erupting in volcanic seduction, as though she is appealing to a lover, intimately intoning from them a point of pleasure.
Don’t fail, you artist. Karma is a threefold storm. You keep your promises if you want to keep your good weather.
“A dark spring is all I ask for,” the artist says, then promises, “and I will a make world you couldn’t ever understand.”
She closes her corsage of cutters. Two thin spatials of invisible pain across each side of her wrist; painless at first, only to slowly return an intense revenge. Blood drips out, dazed and dumb, following the whims of gravity as it is leaking, twin strains of elegant sanguine bounty—the nectar of creation, vitality, humility. Bleeding in a pose all its own.
The artist elevates her hand to the ceiling, reaching for her salvation, wherever it has evaporated. She drops her asymmetrical athame to the bathroom floor—screaming.
“Thank you, Goddess!” The artist is chanting now, in discordance and disdain. “Thank you, Goddess! Thank you, Goddess! Thank you! Goddess!”
She shuts her eyes, as is done—moans the idol of an unseen muse.
Her fury of compounded carnage hits its capacity—a build-up of blood inside the vein now struck apart from its vessel in a formless flood. What was once wrought in duality, now labors unevenly.
As she levitates her chosen limb, surprisingly composed and unshaken by its burden, downward forces compel her exposure to climb down her flesh. Until her arm is in a venous veil of melting-ruby vines, while holding up a hand unexposed, this obelisk clean and pure—not a single smudge above the wrist, too holy of a shrine to be desecrated. Gravity knows.
The artist continues her pose, her high wound above all else, even her body, which is soon enveloped by its virile vines, and she is then wearing veins of vain velour—her body as a bride of blood. Repaying patronage with a marriage by any other means.
“For you, Goddess,” she murmurs, still moaning. “For you—I promise everything.”
Absolution. Then nothing.
All at once, she can’t say if anything has changed. Too caught up in otherworldly ecstasy, she spends a deep hour returning to a normal plane of feeling. Then she cries, repealing to agony. And she removes her shirt, wrapping it around her wrist as if it is a healing cloth soaked in salve.
After she cleans up and disposes of her rage, she goes to the other room, where the objects of her dreams reside. She sets up a blank canvas, waiting to be drawn upon—a state of unmeaning, awaiting its chaotic arrival to the universe of being. All tranquil in mind. Until release.
A dark spring is to come—but love can be reprised.