The Lone Corner
A ray of light cascades the room. The room seems awash in white with reflections from the floor. And out towards the end, there lies a corner. A ridge, a break, a disruption.
Black shadows emerge from the bottom of the corner, their dark shards like stalactites after a storm. There is light and yet there is a strange darkness curving its way through the walls, embedding deep blemishes on the pristine white.
An entire world seems engulfed within, an unknowable bottomless pit, the silence of it a sinister, menacing growl. There is a symphony playing behind in the whites. The beat vibrating through the floors and tingling the eardrums, a strange aural juxtaposition of senses, where the body responds to a rhythm unseen yet the mind nods to a growl inviting into the darkness of the soul. When the mind repeats the wordings heard in the whites, with the metronome of the dark. The resulting melody, a dissonant sentence that means nothing and everything at the same time.
Outside ring the gongs of death, portents of doom, clawing their way through the tiny crevices of doors and windows. Shards from the corner emerge to meet them halfway, their routes traversing through the shadows of every obstacle standing in the path of the white lights. The observer sits perplexed, not having any autonomy over the darkness and the shadows, the spread of the white, and the emerging shards.
A falsetto rings in the distance, a happy major scale, which makes no sense for the dome that engulfs the world seems to be in a dark minor scale. Aural sensitivities emerge, a crude reflection of a limited understanding of the normative, but unable to fill that one piece in a jigsaw puzzle to complete the sentence. There is none. The piece was never there. It was always meant to be that one hole through which everything disappears.
It rains, adding a patter to the mix. This time a different beat. Further extends the cacophony. A guitar riff finds its way to the head, something the observer connected with every single time but now. His nerves are taut, protruding from his head, almost pulsing through the skin, where the synapses dance to a rhythm, one which the observer cannot tell.
He notices that every wall has a region, the ridge that cuts through the light, diminishing the white, a strange V protruding through the walls where they disappear in slivers, the corners protruding the dark so that it can engulf a bit more, just a bit more of the white, so that it can sustain. The writing table, with its lamp, extends the shadow over to the floor where ideas escape into the darkness, the open door an invitation to the nethers.
The moisture cracks the furniture around the house, the wooden stresses trying to relieve themselves, emitting knicks and clacking sounds. The additions don’t work as fillers. The observer’s aural senses seem to be walking away. As everyone walks away. He knows this sound. The steps fade. He remembers a kindness that someone showed him, a glimmer of positivity that he treasured. His ears had felt wonderful that day.
Today, he craves silence. A silence so deep that it can only be his own. And so he only sees the light and the dark amidst the cacophony.
The light offers no respite. Only a bare form for him to see, a reflection that reveals nothing. The shadows offer no remorse, a leviathan swallowing all that exists. They prick the world, steal the light and disappear into the corners from which they emerged.
He sits there, staring. The corners a doorway to nothingness. The dark a means for him to be eaten whole. The withering hopes an overflowing heap which must be emptied.
They said there is light and music outside. The doors should have been left open. But they weren’t. The sounds should have been allowed. But they weren’t. The lights should have cascaded his home. But they didn’t. And so there is the corner, the lone corner where darkness beckons. And there he sits staring, contemplating, and waiting.
The shards persist, the darkness engulfs, and the eyes shall forever be clouded, the whites notwithstanding.
