convenio •• glasia/elena

THERE IS LIGHT everywhere I turn. Even in the darkness it dances. Speckled, falling through my vision. I raise a hand as I lay in bed and watch it hover, swirl, twist at my every whimsical gesture. When I was smaller I would laugh and laugh until my mother came rushing in, worried I was going mad. I tried to let her know that it was just the dust in the shadows, that it could not harm me, that I was the one controlling it. The other doctors said that I had a wonderful imagination. My mother, however, frowned.

And in the day I would watch the light pour through my eyes and light up the world, a spectrum of colour to tumble through. When I am sad the world turns blue, when I am tired the world dulls to grey. (My mother's voice rings in my ears from long ago when I could not see: "Red: angry. Purple: calm. Yellow: happy.") There is a bountiful amount of yellow that leaks against my mother's figure as I read, count, draw, answer questions correctly and pick the right colour. She beams at me and I smile back - I am making her happy, doing what I'm told, doing the right thing. Yellow, yellow, yellow. It bleeds from our skin and our very existence.

She would play music from a radio in the hospitals and I would paint what I saw. A rainbow of ups and downs danced across the sky and splattered across the paper with droplet stains. The men in coats would frown but my Mother would kiss the top of my head and tell me that I was doing well, that I was perfect, that I was fine and fixed and that if  you can't see that my daughter is perfectly fine you can find yourself jobless in the morning. She's fine! Absolutely fine! Her eyes are perfect! The colour of blood would float from her ears and I'd take her hand and squeeze it - red was the worst colour to linger. "Let me read the letters again," I'd say. To my relief the red would vanish, turning to purple once more. Red meant I was doing something wrong. Of all the colours I see, I fear red the most. Red is hate, red is pain. Red is the beginning of destruction.

Now I don't need hospital appointments or men with white coats. Instead I am to do as I please, to paint as much as I'd like, to wander about our District and marvel at everything and anything I see. There is so much to drink in, to heave in the life that falls through the air into my lungs, to remind me that I am alive and so is the world. (And, always, the Dust. Connecting us all, leading me places, my golden path to the waiting unknown.) I wander through my own version of this dread-ridden world and see both halves of the equation. Poverty and riches, fear and freedom, love and hate. It makes up everything, constructs itself around us, things invisible to anybody but I. I could spend hours upon hours just watching and waiting and observing everything that goes on in front of me - but there's something shifting in my vision and it makes me look twice.

There's the Dust - swirling, twirling - but instead of spreading itself out it constructs a path for me to follow. I blink - no change, no shift in my perception. My footsteps patter across the ground and I recall a story I read when I was learning words and books all over again about a little girl who followed a yellow-coloured road and found a new family in a place far away from home.


("Orange: sick. Yellow: happy. Gold: trust, life, light, everything."

"Gold isn't on our list, sweetheart."

"No, but it's everywhere I go."

"What do you mean?"

"The Dust. It's gold. It's the whole wide universe.")

History lingers here. My path has lead me to a place nobody visits anymore, and the quiet is strangely comforting. Normally I would be afraid of places like this but I grew up in empty winding halls that seemed to lead to nowhere. The unknown was my childhood companion and the Dust has never led me astray. (I'd like to think that it never would. I trust it - it is constant, frequent, light and joy.) 

I daren't make a sound. I do, however, dare to hurry. My fingers trace the crumbling walls and I feel years upon years between my skin and the fading wallpaper. They flit across my fingertips as I explore, following the ever-thinning path that disintegrates in the air. Emptiness upon emptiness, dust upon Dust, dirt covering the floors and cracks and windowpanes. It is so empty here, so void of life for so long - I wonder how long life has been departed from these buildings. There is no trace of colour here for my eyes to see, only empty spaces and blank walls and -

I gasp.

The Dust settles around her frame and evaporates as our eyes lock - she is purple and green and blue and reed and yellow and a spectacle of everything else. (I blink and her colours disappear, like they didn't want to be seen in the first place.) I am not supposed to be here - an intruder fate never planned on running into. But they built my eyes and fixed my vision and here I am, as clear as day, at the end of the gold-tainted road. 

"Oh," I breathe, words knocked out of my chest by the weight of her existence here.

The Dust led me to this place: Trust. Life. Light. Everything.

It led me to her.