Tint and Shade

Nights make me realize why I was born. The purpose lies so clean, so sheer, I almost see the parallel universe. Am I writing or just at some slumber party in that other world, wrapped in cosmic silk, laughing with my forgotten selves? It sounds flaky, I know. But it's a glass-skin kind of realization, translucent, impossible, almost unachievable. Still, it clings to me. My monochromatic musings must have been tedious for you. I know I become I-centric. But what else can I do? Somebody has to speak my language. Somebody has to understand me. Somebody has to be my spokesperson. Because there was absolutely no one when I was dragged through the bumpy, unpaved road trip of life. Believe me when I say life asked to see me naked. And not metaphorically. It was a demand, a confrontation, raw and unrelenting. So under the elusive canopy of night, when most lives fold neatly into silence, I felt the spectral tug of existence. Not in the noisy glare of day, but in the gossamer hours when time loosens its grip and reality shimmers, thins at the edges. There, right there, in that fragile interstice, I wandered. Not aimlessly. No. With a strange kind of clairvoyance. Like a soul halfway between dimensions, fingering the veil between the lived and the imagined. To the world, my musings may seem florid, overwrought, narcissistic even. But what they truly are is redemption, not of attention but of self. I am not seeking applause. I am archiving every fracture in my spirit before the world sweeps it away with its clumsy broom of mediocrity. If I turn inward, it is only because the outer world has grown unbearably opaque. And this interior monologue is not indulgence. It is survival. Like scribbling frantically in a burning library, trying to salvage meaning from the flames. Some nights, I swear, my consciousness swells beyond my bones. The mirror does not hold a girl, it holds an aperture. Behind my eyes sits a parliament of selves, debating time, memory, erosion, and reinvention. I am never quite sure if I am writing, or if writing is writing me. Maybe I am at that celestial soirée I once imagined, where lost selves sip starlight and speak in forgotten dialects. And yet beneath all this poetic reverie, I feel the ache of my aloneness. I ricochets off blank walls, hungry for resonance. My conversations drip in grayscale, soaked with storms no one sees. I know I exhaust those who crave linear joy or bite-sized clarity. But I was not made for simplicity. I was born with a tectonic heart, always shifting, breaking, rearranging, never once apologizing for the quake. When life demanded to see me naked, it stripped me of everything: pretence, facades, polite nods, rehearsed smiles. I stood there, vulnerable but unbowed. And though no ambassador of my soul ever stepped forward, I stepped UP. I spoke with my own rebel tongue. If that makes me eccentric, so be it. I wear it like red-velvet cake. Because someone, somewhere, in some parallel universe, maybe over the rim of a dream, is listening.