Dappled

Each time I have a question, I ask the void, and it answers me back in a swarm of melded voices. The void being my class. Students start blending into the walls of their class and dissipate into individual splashes of colors or groups of them when the teachers walk out. But each time I walk in, they assimilate into the great void.

I wondered aloud who was absent that day and the void answered me back. Like any void, it knows answers to everything, but just like any void, it gives you a distorted version of the truth. Think of if you could alter the emotion surrounding a particular truth. That is what the void offers up. Like when I asked a teacher when I was a student if the Sun was actually rising in the east and setting in the west. She had said that it did. Maybe I was taught so to keep it simple in the mind of a child. But who is to know the reality surrounding the movements of the planets and stars? It is equally true that the Earth is revolving around the Sun and equally possible to say that the Sun may be rising and falling because the galaxy of Milky Way is itself moving. Movement is so persistent in this Universe that if you were to measure the movement or fixedness of anything and if you were to base it on a fixed point in the matrix of space, then, yes, everything is possible. Now I know. Back then, the void told me a distorted truth.

As I walked out of the class after taking the attendance, I spotted a group of girls and boys on my way, going back home perhaps after a long day at school. Two girls held hands, swinging them between their blue skirts, echoing their swinging looped braids that were tied up with red ribbons. It instantly reminded me of my school days. The boys were speaking rather fast and excited while one of the girls eyed them funnily. It was as if her eyes were saying, “Don’t talk so fast that the words escape you before you can say them.” But I have seen kids such as them most of the time on my way back from college these days. This was the only time I was able to focus on the people rather than the students.

It may be their uniform blue half pants and skirts, and white shirts that assimilated them. It took much effort or rather loud looks and words from the children to differentiate the dappled colors as separate individual splashes instead of the entire fish.

My brother-in-law had just been at the local grocery store that I decided to visit on the way back home. We decided to walk back together to home once I told him about the new painting I bought, and he, as a curator, wanted a look. We carried our bags of onion, potatoes, apples, and bananas back to my apartment where I had the piece.

I was prepared for him to critique my purchase by calling it too simple because I bought it from an up-and-coming artist's exhibit.

He went up to the canvas. I held my breath. He traced his fingers on the raised oil paint bumps. He said that he liked it, that it was so interesting that the artist decided to not blend as much, but rather throw a bunch of colors together in a calculated sequence, that when you looked at it from afar, it really looked like a horse galloping through water and sand on a beach.

For the first time, I saw it again. Truly saw it. Saw its illusion. When I went up close, each color – yellows, oranges, and reds of the horse or the greens, blues, turquoise, and whites of the ocean, or even the tans, yellows, and whites of the sand – were separate raised peaks of paint that were not blended into each other. The sheer incoherence made me feel stupid when I looked at any particular area of the canvas. That meant that my brother-in-law was doing his job right. Usually, curators will make you feel stupid. Or, that is the void in my head speaking. Really, I knew he was doing his job right. Because he was telling me the truth. He was showing me the unseen. The hidden.

The void in my head takes over many times. The multiple tunes in my mind blend together to create a semblance of cohesiveness yet, in all its aspects, it is incohesive. It never truly makes sense. Unless, until, I take it apart part by part and look at each part individually. And truths come to face me in their purest forms.