On being.

Being where I am, the walls of the room are beige.

I just returned from walking to the Home Hardware at the corner of Britannia Road and Queen Street to pick up paint chips.

Paint chips?  I don’t even know if that’s the right word.  Paint chips? That doesn’t sound right.  Sour crème and onion, salt and vinegar, all-dressed and ranch.  Flavours that would burn your mouth, stinging with pleasure and provocation like American TV siphoned to us via Buffalo so that we could watch Commander Tom, connect to Biff Beeper and explore The Kingdom of Could Be You.

Whatever the word is for those slips that you pick up at the hardware store from an array as splendiferous as that of a peacock in full display. Fuchsia. Magenta. Vermilion. Puce. The names of the colours were so exotic that I often didn’t even know what the words meant that described them. 

I can’t eat potato chips anymore, I can’t eat anything hard, my teeth can’t take it, and they are not long for this world.  And the pain sometimes, it drives me crazy if it catches me off guard or it lingers longer than it is welcome.  I am afraid that there is something wrong within me, a dark reality just around the corner. Like the fires in the news from Lackawanna and Cheektowaga that they show on Buffalo evening news.

I lose my balance.  I feel like I am having a stroke.  I lose my sense of geography and my notion of history.

Jesus Christ I just want to paint my walls green.

Because I know that I will be so goddamn happy once I paint my fucking walls green.

It’s not perfect every day.  It’s not pretty every moment.

I see signs of early cognitive decline in my mother.  I know deep in the dark part of reality that I will live with my mother until she dies.  I will stay with her and protect her from the darkness. I know one day I will be holding my mother and she will be dead. From that moment on there will be no one left in the world that loves me.  That loves me for who I am.

Mousetraps get set.

Fun and games.

Nothingness.

I love watching the robins build their nest in the spring so they can lay their eggs, robin’s egg blue.  They do still call it that don’t they? Robin’s Egg Blue, or maybe Whispering Oasis. 

I just want to paint my fucking walls green.

Because I know I will be so goddamn happy when I paint my fucking walls green.

I don’t believe I will ever fall in love nor will anyone fall in love with me.

I should start to try to find some heroine just in case the pain gets too bad.  I want for there to be no pain and only joy for my mother for when she exits.  I want to be numb afterwards.  I will leave enough for me so I too feel no more pain just the soft shells of a robin’s egg against the soles of  my bare feet.

I examine the paint chips that I picked up. I see too much grey in one, a little yellow in the other and I want to paint my walls green, no hints of one no illusion of the another. 

I land on the colour that is the destiny of the colour of the walls in the room that I suffer, the walls that surround me to protect me, and the room in which I will die alone.

Lush meadow.

I will be truly happy when I paint the walls of my room lush meadow.