Lady Sings in Greens

Looking back at it now, it was a heedless cry. Not one for help. Just- just listen. It’ll make sense soon.

I’ve never thought I'd be so convinced of my own fantasy.

I took a second to reevaluate a small error in my head. One that has won the war with time and patience. As funny as it sounds, the possibility of answering it became apparent nearly a half century later. But as I note, the closer we got, the further away we went.

It seems to be, while slugging through a go signal, you pick out the most trivial things to distract yourself from motion. It was her for me. Someone who I’ve seen somewhere before. I can still see it. Those last outer blurry frames fixed on a central point. As it rolled on, shutter speed slowing, her head rose swiftly. Infecting her surroundings with a green glow. Her lips nearly stretched to her ears with a smile that stopped time.

I swore she waved me over. My car beeped before braking for itself. An abrupt stop. I guess something happened with the traffic pillars. Simultaneously all vehicles lost their inertia. Forced with a decision to wait for the avenue to clear or joining fellow motorist as they escaped their cars, I found myself exiting my own vehicle. In a hurried search for a tall, brown, kinky hair tamed in two poofs, reverse 8 balls for eyes and smooth brown skin with a hint of devils red. And that smile that dwells a pulse. She was between the underneath of the seventh avenue sign and the old bus hut.

Rushing, shoving, and trampling over car hoods and their drivers. I scattered throughout the immediate grounds. On my tippy toes, scanning faces, looking for those repeating details I keep lipping softly. In the distance, for what seemed like an hour, I finally spotted her across the street. Two bushes of bouncy hair aiming to turn onto the adjacent avenue. The driver of the truck struck his door. Apologizing, I climbed off in a hurry.

I had my eyes fixed on that corner. A retro computer café was dug into its apex. My senses sharpening, as if hunting, eyes dilated, I heard that oh so familiar over the door-bell sing. Before i knew it, I forced a noisy swing. The shift supervisor eyeing me from the desk beyond the entrance to the side. Shushing me. I bow my head and waved as I strolled, still repeating those detail, remembering that face.

There always was a noise association with her presence. A bell, a ring, chime, vibration. Something that notifies you. And as I turn the divider of this cubicle labyrinth, there she was. She stood facing me with open arms at the end of this channel. The quicker I ran, the longer the distance. The more tense, anxious, impatient, and exhausted I grew. The walk way stretched into oblivion. where the elasticity clowned my efforts of gaining or closing our distance. And then- a growing buzzer. Whaling in this dead space of this stop action scene.

I woke up, arms swinging for a phantom embrace. Risen like my lower half had suffered rigor mortis. Night sweats adored racing off of my face. Sitting as your cognition returns, in the dead of morning, to only notice that this was just another dimension of deception. Another cry. Another dream. Another delusion. or maybe, lucidity? Nah- couldn’t be.

These mornings started the same. Wash, cook, coffee, self-encouragement podcast and work. The second to last task receiving little to no check markings on the white board stuck to the fridge. As of late, there’s no encouraging words I’m confident in expelling.

I was waiting for something I couldn’t understand or define. Stuck, like hands on the wheel of life, but the car keeps the same motto. One pedal: accelerate.

My morning commute was the most liberating hour of my days. Stroking my temple in circles help decrease the momentary stress of being surrounded. Avenue to avenue, bumper to bumper, I crept with ceased shocks. Late for work as usual. Until I noticed a line of pitted cars. Rolling down the window I heard faint sounds of first responders sirens. Drones fly over in a bushel. Diving deep into the traffic jam.

I took in the commotion of angered drivers pushing forward only to become more sandwiched. My car on pilotless mode, I released my safety belt to breach the car in its stop and go motion. I scanned my immediate environment, I took notice of the familiarity of this scene. I read the bent avenue sign. “Seventh” I whispered under my breath. I dropped my glare to the find the same dingy metal housing of the bus stop. It’s dirty plastic covered ad irreplaceable as it’s been stuck in that same enclosure since I was a boy.

I raced, frog hopping through lanes. I found myself elevating myself onto car hoods. I heard a bell become attacked by a hard wooden door. The ding pulling me to my destination. Nothing but a yearning for conclusion fueled my propulsion. Whatever landed under my feet broke with my forced stride. Off I was. So quickly I swear I caught the door on its back swing shut. Past the receptionist with a fear of noise I go, thorough a maze of cubicles, she stood boasting a smile in the stretching hall. And then- a burrowing alarm that cried like a freshly woken child.

Panicked, throwing myself into a proper posture sit up, I woke. Unfortunately.

-From the outside of the sensory virtualizing incubation chamber-

“How is my father?” The sprinkle of gray and black king hair woman inquires with hints of emotional repression. Something that stems from the realization that there are two answers only: well or no improvements. His decline has been as rocky as a disturbed sea with crumbles of giantic rock splashing into its ever moving waters. Dissolving more sea, becoming more land, filling as the days go by. Her dry voice, low and shaky, partially muffled by a tear dabbing handkerchief travels short. The lighter liver spots on the back of her dark skin adding speckles of not only age, but experience.

“He’s trapped himself in a fantastic self-induced lucid loop with a strong figment. Like a saviors complex that is not within him. Due to this memory error, he can't find any other ways to escape this single day without first, as we concluded, figuring out who She is.“ The narrow, middle aged, dark man draped in a blue tinged lab jumper, augmented realty glasses, wandering the control board slides a single frame onto the holographic center screen within the white dome like laboratory. Partially blocking their view of the transparent sensory deprivation egg that houses her father. The subject strung, suspended in immersive liquid within the containment by a single escaping hovel filled with lingering wires.

“Well,” a sniffle interrupts “Doc. Do you know who it might be? I- I mean. Can’t we search?” Her gaze of desperation shining through with the dawning grim chances of death or success.

“There’s one big problem with that Mrs. Alve.”

She waited, locked in an inescapable confrontation. Within millisecond she scrambles endless ideas of what could be the only thing that holds the last member of the consules chance to win full, unquestioned liberation to this failing systematic world ran by totalitarianism. The one thing that needed to be extracted from his cellular memory. Something that has escaped years worth of scanning, rescanning, reacting and provocation. Rather than his return to her, remember who he was in his elder years or becmone subdued and allow mental tapping, he wanders aimlessly in the same chaotic figment.

“He’s not looking for a person, per say. Or remembering who he tryely was. Or the mission at hand. He hasnt even realized his own name.” Eyebrows flared, she nods to allow the doctor to continue. “He’s looking for God. Or, as his psyche has labeled it, The Green Light. The reason we’re all here in the first place.”