I got high a couple of days ago with some friends and was in a very strange place for a while. I did some writing, this is it:
Camera zooms in in in
There’s me, this thought. Lit up
Just a spark inside my head
Zoom out: the brain, the shell
Out: to the blue air in the room
To the music, lyrics “whatever
what the hell”. Who am I?
Zoom out, zoom out. Photos
show a young family, ageing
backwards; from the coloured photo
bad colours, I know this, somehow
Too dark, the green and purple
dominate the picture, drowning
out the figures. The dark-haired couple
(she tall, he with large glasses, coloured by the outside)
with their baby.
Ageing in reverse, backward to
the first photo of Rebekka Charlotte
ten minutes old and the whole world
to her parents and their smiles.
The mother with her shrinking bump and then
back to nothing.
To a couple on the church steps. In, to their faces and down, past the skin.
“hello, welcome to Beginning” says the cool voice of the woman from every crap 90’s school science video you’ve ever seen. The animation jerks and black flecks fly across its surface, like old film projected onto the screen in your least-favourite Grandma’s front room. The cells rushing around, the process in slow motion: fertilisation, multiplication, the baby growing. Zoom back out to the bump, my mother’s smile. The family scattered across Europe in 20 years time.
Focus in. To me, in the house on the bed. Eyes closed, windows open. Missing the world as it expands out from me. The blue and the green, the people; their feelings, the trees. Me and my parents and siblings a block of colour in our house, on our street. Flying. Out of the street vertically. The house next door is a tiny mauve box, barely flickering. Across the street a striking grass green comprised of yellow and emerald shines out. Each house seems like a cardboard box, delineating separation. The inside in or the outside out?
And out and out. The world a glowing mass of boxes. The world a tiny neuron, lit up inside my brain.
