Tuesday, July 28, 2009

“The Sky Inside Me”



The sky inside me looks like the round ball of my brain floating in sunset colors and I am very small lying on my back turning my head to the side and tucking my chin to my shoulder to glimpse the horizon past my feet.
…Lying on my brain and suddenly I am the cinematographer wanting more yellow-orange sunlight, less misty ocean spray light.
I am asking my staff to add mountains to the distance, which they do and then- what if this were all to take place at midnight and the sky inside me is black and there are stars and my hand that I hold up in front of my face is a silhouette of a hand?
My staff listens intently and nods. There is an echoing bang of someone pulling a lever that suddenly shifts the scene to what I had seen in my head.
So what should happen here?

I stand. All I am is the clicking of film through the camera, eating up the light. I've forgotten that I had a hand a moment ago. I defiantly don’t have a hand now.
So what should happen here? I have no idea. I'm like those huge production companies with all the money who manage to make Meryl Streep look like a fool because they have her but- what to do with her?
I walk towards the starry edge of my brain which is wet under my feet like tiles around a swimming pool, and thin soft moss has covered pieces of the mosaic and look- my feet are leaving footprints in the moss! Something I did not know could happen.
But what should happen here?

I look up and see that the stars are not stars at all but little fireflies, blinking and whizzing across the sky inside me, above me, where I stand on my brain.
What a perfect location. I sit down and trace a mosaic bird with my finger.

I stand and tell my staff to catch three fireflies in a jar… make one of the interns do it.
The skinny girl wearing skinny jeans, a nose ring and thick-framed glasses darts forward slipping a bit on the wet tile in her eagerness to impress. She holds the glass jar up high and whirls it round catching not three but five little stars.
“okay,” I tell them as she hands me the lighted jar, “I've got it.”
I hold the jar up “dim the lights.”
That echoing bang and they’ve done it.
“find me a little kid, big eyes.” They bring me Freddy Highmore and I put the jar of fireflies on the ground and Freddy sits before it.
“three bells.” Yells the eager intern.
“action!” I say
it will be silent so I continue to talk
“close on his eyes, watching the flies. Do you think you’ll get any of the detail in the tile? The mosaic?”
they promise me detail, mosaic.
“check the gate.”
Echoing bang and then darkness

I'm lying on my brain looking past my arm, my foot at the sunset colors of my inner sky.
All I am is a clicking camera. If I said before that I had hands I lied. I only want to eat the light.

3 comments:

  1. so lovely. How can I subscribe?

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  2. Rss, that orange thing with wave in your address bar (depending on your browser).


    I'm definitely subscribing (Google Reader ftw).

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