It started when I looked at the sky. It was sunset and it had just rained. Light, over where I was, had started to dim, as if someone was sinking into their sheets for some night-time reading.
I saw clouds. Clouds, at first. Then, I saw fluffy wisps of thick mush, crafted into sky meringues. Then, I saw freshly lit coals become embers, except that they were suspended from, tacked against a salmon-pink sky. Then I told my friends to come out and look. “Embers! Look at the clouds, they look like embers.”
They didn’t see them. They just saw clouds.
Thirty minutes prior, I was looking through a friend’s art, an art gallery balancing on my lip. I savored the moment, just looking deep into this well. It could have been thirty minutes or a mere eternity, I wasn’t sure.
Then, I drove home. My eyes had just been freshly peeled. I saw light yellow skies by the highway. Clouds again like meringue, shades of waning orange and red and yellow, somehow degrading upwards toward the cosmos. And as I drove further down the road, around the bends, and onto the main highway that would take me home, the world swelled up and exploded up in size, beyond the my awareness of my body, occupying space, my thoughts soaking up every minute of my consciousness. All I could see was the pastiche of thick, rich colors, splattered upon the skies, lit by the setting sun. Clouds shaped like rice noodles wrapped around a chopstick, like icing coming out of a funnel onto a cupcake, like fresh toothpaste. Nothing mattered other than this ebb and tide of color, crashing down on me, but the crash not leaving marks or scars or wounds.
“Beauty. I’m seeing beauty. My brain is opening up!” I told myself.
As more minutes whizzed past me, I turned off at the exit. The skies were much darker than on the highway.
I was home, under the night’s darkness, but not cut off from the beauty.
