Memory Dust (Now)

The worst part was her handwriting.

(If you could even call it that...)

All right, perhaps the “rotting fruits of her fingertips...”

It was more of a bewildered disarray of markings, primitive at best. It was almost anthropological in essence, but without the graduate-student lust and allure of the feat of its inevitable profound translation. Her writing bore no capacity for interpretation. It was an agent uniformed in discomfort to its viewers, and served to convolute and confuse.

The monster was this:

Her o’s didn’t close all the way. The middle line in her capital E’s was always longer than the top and bottom lines. Lower case f’s didn’t curve like they should, hers resembling a baby tree laden with a dump of snowfall. C’s and L’s stuck together to be mistaken for lowercase d’s. S’s lost the autonomy of their curves, and instead mimicked commas. Her N’s possessed some nonhuman harshness, biting the subsequent letters with titanium teeth.

The spaces between her words were inconsistently too small and sometimes non-existent.

She couldn’t submit to the edict of lined paper. Her words still fluctuated in and out of the thin blue boundaries like a baby snake darting about in snow.

She wrote with too much pressure.

Her lead broke and the ink smeared and she misspelled too many things. Her black erase marks thinned the paper. She couldn’t draw straight lines.

She hated the messiness of her most profound thoughts. The depths of her mind dwelled in the mud of stagnant ponds and gutters. Her dreams and visions lived in the midnight boondock of a swamp. She was immune to order. Despite any dotted lines, special plastic grips, or proper “training,” the intellectual red tape kept her ugliness trapped within the lifelines of her palms.  She was plagued with an inability to translate herself. She was destined to sit on the throne as the Queen of Misunderstood. Her monster became tangible with every homework assignment, every receipt, every grocery list, every tax return, every birthday card, and every calendar.

It made her worse.

It made her dizzy.

All of her art existed within a meta-plane of ugliness, covalent enough to avoid beauty and the pretenses of ionic charge. She couldn’t make her art feel beautiful; it instead was dusty and powdered upon a magnetic square, stretched around the corners of a refrigerator. It always retained a layer of dirt, the remnants of bones, or some smudge that corrupted the purity of her words.

And no one would dare to look past the spots.

So her heart would race. And she’d get clumsy. She couldn’t justify it fast enough. So instead she’d swallow her tongue. And feel her abandoned unspoken words escape through clammy palms and a pale face.

At the promise of solitude, she’d retreat to the self-sounding safety of her caves, and she’d pick up the drained words to nurse them back to language, to meaning. And her own hands betrayed her and left more stains, somehow paradoxically illuminating the face of her fear: a grimy artist. Her reflection on the tanned carcass was a conjured image of defeat, imminently and relentlessly charging towards her. The architecture of her neurons was dirtied threads that transmitted a toxic self-poison.

It was a self-perpetuating cycle of her deafening, oblivious muse.

Nothing could keep her clean.

Nothing could make it pure.

It (she) was dry and cracked and now

-CB