Cloud White 15, French Grey 6, Vellum 2

[justice_turtle]

Name: Peter
Story: JT's Mixed Bag
Colors: Cloud White #15 (Soft as a cloud), French Grey #6 (Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms), Vellum #2 (Lacuna)
Supplies and Styles: Fingerpainting, Stain (They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum. --Tallulah Bankhead), Fabric, Chalk (#15), Novelty Beads (heavy eyes), Glitter (Try to make sense of something that’s confusing you right now)
Word Count: 250
Rating: G
Warnings: Dissociation, free verse, low level of fictionality



I don't... feel real.

I feel like this is all an elaborate vacation from reality;

like I'm marking time until I wake up or go back;

like I'm floating around in liminal spaces, having fallen through the cracks

(all the cracks);

I feel like there is no life,

no future that starts here.

I'd have to go back.


I feel like I did before, when I was in nobody's world,

when I was kept in a cage, marking time, checking the bars.

I feel like my clutch is slipping. My gears go around,

but there's nothing, nowhere they can catch on,

nowhere they can latch into the fabric of the real world

and pull me, creaking,

up the side of the cliff,

out of this hole into reality.


I feel like a half-lost memory,

an empty shell;

I feel like the shed skin of a cicada or a Junebug,

floating in the minds of people who never knew me.


I feel like I am not real

and like I am the only thing that is real;

I feel like a mote of reality lost in a world of illusion

and like a holographic sham

twisted and tangled in the minds of all those

who think they remember me.


And between the real me

and the real world

there lies an impenetrable wall:

clear,

intangible,

frictionless,

impossible to break.

I slide along it like a ghost,

a shadow,

never touching, never reaching

into a world that doesn't realize I left it.