smoke and mirrors
In movement, I think at times that I have unlocked the secrets to this obscurity.
Photographs and footsteps, they’re all that’s left when you’re seen through; and 2020 has been our year of invisibility. Formless, un-opaque, refractive index 589.29, 1.000293, an open book with lemonade ink. I’ve lived its dreary scathing indictments without a stage, and often mused of the comfort of the unseen: how easy it would be, to easily be. But comfort is passe.
You should know by now that we thrive in careful strategic debasements of the spirit. Of spirits. Perhaps I’m like Casper, the friendly ghost. I prance round my most inebriated nights, scarring rather than scaring, because us fading few want tokens that fade with us, and scars do fade. Isn’t it the fate of ink to fade too? Or our fate, as people of spirit, to move on. Is there a point to moving on? “Holding on to things, that’s the point”, isn’t that that the solemn truth, anchorage?
In movement, I think at times that I have unlocked the secrets to this obscurity. I think, maybe I’m moving too fast, so fast that I can no longer be seen. Am I a speedster whizzing past these threats, games, faiths, and revelations that to your eyes I am always just a shade? A blurry trail of light, my will becomes the will-o-the-wisp. If the only things that remain photographs and footsteps, that sounds like a gorgeous mystery to follow; a loupe for the loop, a sleuth for the slain.
Or say that it isn’t speed, but memory. The Whovian Silence that are invisible because they are forgotten, the Weeping Angel that, again, in quantum fortune can move only when unseen, am I that entangled that sight now makes me static? It’s only in the corner of your eye — that Goldilocks zone between seen and unseen — where I now reside and can make my home.
Invisibility, then, is object impermanence. You’re gone but I cannot forget, so your visage is clear to me, and you are real. I’m here but I am forgotten, so I vanish and reappear, like leftover spectres screaming for their will to be done in realms distinctly unavailable for your hearing.
Many nights I feel your palm cupping my face, shutting my eyes, so even if I cannot see I can feel this darkness, I can feel this memory in the voids your silhouette leaves behind and trace back a whisper of a song. For what’s more invisible than a tune in your head, stuck, driving you mad, because you just can’t place where you heard it? The recurring beautiful kind. A thing is beautiful because it sticks, not because it is seen.
A thing is kind because it sustains.
And it has been a kind year. Who’d’ve thunk it?
That in its very own accelerated pace, in all that is lost, it’d give me the gift of homemade wine, mass produced friendship, and a plethora of loving arms to be held within? And it makes sense.
Phone cameras are more advanced these days. They’re better at capturing the swift, the blurry, the otherwise invisible blades of a ceiling fan. I came to believe that invisibility is just a long exposure photograph: capturing the starry trails, the many risings and settings of the scholarly sun.
But I also think that invisibility is cosmic blinking — stretched out, across decades. Your eyes are shut for the moments that I pass by, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t exist. It’s just bad luck.
For this next year, I don’t think I will ask to be seen, but I will try to be beautiful; to be worthy of sight. Luck will someday turn, and my passing grace must, then, be well armed with the lustre of clear glass shining in the sun, or still water’s reflection. A reflection.
I know that it is the fate of mirror and glass to break. I’m not asking not to. I ask only that it happens under the warm supervision of the moon, my original teacher — the first beautiful thing any of us have ever seen fade, the one light that returns unceasingly.
I blink, and sleep. I wake up, and see light. I detect you, hiding in the corner in plain sight.
And I love you, the way I’ve come to love all my fears.
