Spectra - Installment 1

A Letter to You, the Reader

_______

I can no longer hear the colors, though I still feel the varying shades of blue that cast themselves against the walls of my bedroom through the slats of my blinds. I write this to you in complete silence. I do not hear even a single decibel of yellow, nor a shade of pink. My brain, in its totality, is naked; it’s only in times like this - these solitary hours of the night - that I can return to this perverted silence. The record player has been still since nine o’clock, since my neighbors tend to dislike such disruptions in the hours leading up to morning. And so, to pass the time spent listening to the saliva accumulate in the front of my mouth, I write. I have written every night, unfettered, for the last thirty years. It is the only way I know to compensate - to divert the energy spent listening to pure nothingness into something requiring attention. Writing has become the distraction to the quiet that perturbs me. The quilt on my bed does not sing. The walls, freshly papered with fluorescent bluebells, refuse to trill. The soles of my slippers, thread-bare and graying, do not chitter with neglect; they merely are. Everything that exists is silent; however, I feel their vibrations. They pulsate at my temples in tendrils like phantom limbs. So, it is with this silence and this pain that I finally tell you my story: what was stolen from me, and what I have suffered as consequence. Though you will never posses the means to empathize, I can only imagine (regretfully, of course) that you too have had something taken from you. Whether or not this something is so utterly imperative that you've resorted to a near nocturnal nature in its absence, that is entirely your prerogative, though I do not mean to imply in any respect that my problems are worse than yours. However, I hope that those of you who have never experienced this shade of grief will come to appreciate your fortune and eventually make the conclusion for yourself that the romanticization of tragedy is the purest tragedy in itself.

I used to hear the colors, and they sounded beautiful.

-L.J.W, August 19th, 2095