Kaleidoscope

one

“I think, that if I touched the earth,

it would crumble;

It is so sad and beautiful,

So tremulously like a dream.”  - Dylan Thomas, Clown in the Moon

The town of Lowell was a terrible place for distractions.

Jesse shook his hair out of his face. The wind was relentless, pushing and pulling at him like it thought he was doing something wrong. It was cold, too. The sun hadn’t made an appearance in days. February wasn’t a good month in Lowell, at least not in Jesse’s experience. But he’d grown up in Florida. He had different standards. Jesse was used to theatrics, to flair and heat and perpetually lush vegetation. This charmless limbo would never be his world. Not really.

Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be.

Lowell was a terrible place for distractions. It wasn’t bright or lovely or exciting.

It was limbo. And that was exactly what Jesse wanted.

❀

Jesse stopped on his way towards the river to light a cigarette. He couldn’t make it burn. The flame of his lighter quivered too violently in the breeze. Or maybe his hands were shaking. It was hard to tell.

Either way, there was no one around to wonder about it. The streets were empty. Unusual for a Saturday - but it made sense. The unfriendly weather had driven most people inside, into restaurants and cute little boutiques lined with silk pillows and neatly painted ceramic. People were strange like that. They sought out the brightest places, as if the gray color of the sky offended them. As if they didn’t want it when the sun wasn’t there, drifting like a shining yellow balloon.

Jesse liked the sun, too, but he didn’t need it. He didn’t need a spotlight illuminating him where he stood. He didn’t need the world’s textures and colors to make him feel like he existed, like he was alive.

More to the point, he didn’t want it.

His mother did.

His mother had wanted the spotlight. She’d wanted the colors. And, for a while, she’d had them. Jesse could still see her, standing on her tiptoes, hanging crystals from the ceiling so that the morning sun cast rainbows on the wall. He could see her turning on the radio, could see her swaying in time to the music no matter how awful it was. She’d had everything.

Until, all of a sudden, she hadn’t. And once she’d decided that, not all of the sun’s radiance could make her feel alive.

It had, for example, been a blindingly sunny morning when she’d collapsed on the kitchen floor, her limbs twitching desperately against the leaf-green tiles. Jesse, standing at the top of the staircase and trying to put on his shoes, had immediately known what was wrong.

Serotonin poisoning. An overdose of antidepressants. It meant trouble. It meant low blood pressure and hallucinations and seizures.

It meant death.

Until that morning, Jesse’s mother had only ever made it as far as the seizures.

Until that morning, he’d always been able to force her back to life, to call an ambulance and make the doctors work until her pulse went back to normal and she woke up. He had waited in the hallways outside her room and focused on breathing deeply, pretending he didn’t know how furiously she cried each time she woke to find herself enshrined in a hospital room, an effigy of someone already dead inside.

There had been no crying this time. Just his breathing, in and out, sounding strangely loud in the empty hallway while several feet away the doctors worked until his mother’s heart rate weakened and she died.

Jesse’s hands shook. The lighter went out again.

“Damn it,” said Jesse. He turned his back to the wind, hunched his shoulders, and made another attempt. The end of the cigarette started to glow. Jesse exhaled in relief, blew a film of blue smoke into the air. He started walking again. The river wasn’t far away.

It had been two weeks now. Two weeks since his mother’s death and a week since Jesse had packed up and moved to Lowell, hoping to find a different sort of brilliance than the Florida sunshine. Smoking outdoors and eating Chinese takeout on the floor of his motel room night after night probably didn’t count, but hey, at least he could say he’d tried.

Jesse reached the thin pathway that stretched parallel to the river and stopped walking. Taking slow, deep breaths of air, he leaned on the railing that separated him from the water. It was a wide place, the path by the river. The horizon, gray speckled with olive-green trees and the faint glow of traffic lights, seemed to be longer even than the vast ribbon of water. Jesse felt like leaning to one side, to see if the horizon would tilt when he shifted his weight, but he knew that was silly. It was a steady place at heart. A balanced place.

Jesse stayed there, leaning on the railing beside the path, and watched the boats and cars pass him by. There wasn’t much to see. A truck barely avoided running over a bicyclist. A dog barked. A woman waved to Jesse from one of the boats. But in between those things, there were long stretches of silence, of complete stillness.

Jesse didn’t mind. He stood there and watched the city and let it swallow the sound of his breathing. Let it fill him with the feeling of not existing, of being somewhere in between worlds. Of being in a place that didn’t really count. He let himself dissolve into the gray horizon, carried away by the wind and the sharp blue smoke.

Emptiness was surprisingly nice when you had nothing else left.