Senses on a Rainy Night

8pm Sunday (2/2/14)

Night time, and the intentions now are different. Take away sight (or lessen sight) and my other senses would be required to do their thing. So I set out to do my thing, call upon my senses to show me what they got. Show me what you got oh put-on-the-spot receptors of my small reality. Show me what you got.

Smell: I take in three deep breaths, nothing. It smells like nothing. Whats nothing smell like? Deep breath again, and there it is: someone’s doing laundry. Somewhere a dryer tube is puffing out warm wafts of lilac, and I’m getting it-- ever so slightly-- emphasizing it and spiking it with narration. I register it to this moment: a memory in process. The mood, my mood, has taken a split-hair turn, enough for me to look at my ambivalence from a different angle.

 I’m thinking about aromatherapy, about lilac, about the book The Giver. In this story, the Giver lets Jonas experience memories of the world: fear, joy, awe, shock, ETC. When I smell lilac I am transported to a pleasant memory that’d be titled, for the Giver’s purposes, as “The Overwhelming Need to Share Something Beautiful.”

I’m five, and I’m snapping lilac. I’m collecting the spectrum (white to purple), holding them in my clutch. I’m barely holding on to my body’s movements in my excitement to share these bombs of fragrance and color. For my mother! For my mother! I can think of no one/nothing  but my mother.

Touch: It’s raining and I feel the cold moist air finding its way into my clothes. My hot skin, barricaded with its man-made materials (say for some cotton laced in the mix) confronts the invasion and tufts of truces erupt in invisible mushroom clouds of condensations and evaporations. Hot or cold, the feeling is wet.

Sound: There’s the drip!/drip!/drip! of water torture that isn’t torture at all. (Water torture provides a sturdy template of sound, but when its mold is removed is the uneasiness of the initial evocation of torture too powerful a residue?) Or maybe I like this idea of torture: going crazy to the sound/feel of water like a “would you rather?” game without an alternative option. drip!/drip!/drip!

Taste: I taste only my mouth. I taste my ambivalence. How I won’t lick the road, or the tree or the house or the human or the animal dead or alive. I taste my baby steps. I taste my taste in growth that’s only comprehended via a time-lapse camera. I taste my ambivalence. Hard headed and stubborn is a taste, too sure of itself to tag any type of metaphor.

Sight: This sight, which I thought would be lessened, is nothing further from the truth. Everything is illuminated with a light that shines not from the sun, but from within. So that dead tree: brighter and deader (yes, deader) and more alive in its deadness (and beauty) than I’ve ever felt.

No people or cars, but yellow/orange squares of windows and the flickering movement of a shitty (sorry-- Eagles and Steelers baby) Superbowl game. A bus (61A) filled with empty seats and bus driver who’s fair game to caste a narrative upon.

A burnt mattress leans against the slick dumpster of our apartment. I’m thinking about the fire that burns behind every visual, every sense, every story, every ambivalence and every open heart.