The Versicolor Wall with Flaking Paint

Dear Arson,

Write this moment down. Take a record of this day because this day is the day I suck it up.

The day I swallow the lump in my throat that I regarded as impossible to swallow over the decades in which I grew beside and with you. That very lump in my throat had solidified into a stone ever since. It had made itself felt in me as it hardened like a brick wall becoming unlike anything I’ve ever known. But so do remember this day.

I presume you’ve settled in the clinic by now. Four days ago when you left, the weather was harsh and the road ahead, long. Hope you rested well and the place is nice but what do I know?

I promised you that I will keep it together and I will. 

I know that this letter might be worth garbage because I might well be talking to myself. I know the pattern that your ill mind takes by now as well as I know my name: You’ll start reading these lines of a foreign person with a confusion that’s short to live. You’ll try in a deceiving diligence to recall the name signed on the bottom; Maybe if I’m lucky, scattered patterns of memories we’ve made will even idly form to shortly deform again and I’ll lose you as fast as I had gained you when I began writing.

Your mind was my foe but all that it causes no longer phase me anymore. 

Arson you should have seen me. My surrender was the toughest thing I did. Sending you to the clinic you are in right now has cost us our lifetime and I am sorry for my selfishness. But ultimately, you would have been proud.

I will keep making sure they take care of you well.

Much love

The night I made the decision to send him was when,

I saw him, his eyes were open, wide, wide open. 

I saw how he looked at the wall flaking paint. He actually failed, miserably, to see anything in it– on it; for he spent hours on end seeing nothing. I thought to myself, only just a slight ability to perceive could take one to recognize the diminishing paint and care to act on it, change it. But if one is diminishing alongside the paint itself, what good would come out of one? How will one care for anything at all, be able to change the small when the big is percolating, pressing and devouring everything small in its way. It’s making it into itself like a snowball getting higher, growing bigger, falling down from a hill.

Maybe he did initially try making sense of what he was seeing. Before this moment where he sat at the corner, his sight left him momentarily as his eyes got fixated; That could have been– that might have been because he must have started from somewhere. You see, he wasn’t like this before– How did he end up here? How did you end up here? What were you thinking this time; to spread your legs, face the wall– what made you, what got you there, again? And again? And will again– God damn, you can’t tell why, can’t even turn your head, face me, see me, know me for who I am; Can you now?

So his legs were spread, lifeless, both his feet let loose. Spine going inward, formed a loose C shape. It reminded me of how a kindergartener would write the letter like: Newly learned, motor behavior unacquired; The kid’s incompetence apparent in how the “C” is dented, how it’s slightly curved in the middle, communicating doubt, hesitation; communicating weakness.

At that moment, I wanted to punch myself in the guts, awfully punish myself for my complete lack of prudence, foresightedness, inability to fucking pick a clue, comprehend the pattern and accept he is just not getting better– never will. Because in the past five years in which his mental health took a declining turn, he did not get any better beside me– I knew it then and I know it now. Patients suffering from this condition regularly have ups and downs and all who emotionally rely on them (what a complete understatement) are advised in continuity to stop (fucking stop) the relentless, the stubborn hoping. We get advised to refrain from attachment; keep a balanced, healthy hopefulness, a self-uplifting but not an “unrealistic” faithfulness.

Now he’s floating mid-air in another universe so come tell me how I can be “realistically” faithful.

I do not know how long it’s going to last this time. I am unable to predict. There are times of days when hours would pass and he wouldn’t move a limb while some others would be different when the way he could easily and quickly pick himself up from the depths would just jolt me. It would make me visualize him literally leaving a rope for himself to wait for him, hanging at the entrance of the deep hollow as if he knew what he was going in for. Then he would use it to drag himself back up to me, up to the surface of the earth.

And I, knowing to expect the least: that I might probably not hear a word slip through his dried-out lips and probably not enter his occipital lobe through his blanked eyes for at least two hours, would think how I would never wish this way of learning of patience on anyone.

But I would keep hurting myself. My naivety, my bullet-proof armor softened from the inside– I would fall for it blindfold, each time letting myself get hopeful. I would feel my whole shivering body wrap itself around Arson in my imagination and like a foolish kid, I would cover my ears and sing away the voice of Doctor Kunny in my head, piling up on me everything I already know: Any positive change in his day-to-day trends is not enough to take a medical notice. Such actions are volatile and we shouldn’t let minor ups deceive us in the hilly road we’re walking on.
I’d have all of this engraved in my mind but still keep his temporary up locked in my heart while shutting my eyes to the reality of his streaks of downs; 

And I didn’t see in me the strength to refrain myself from hoping. I didn’t see the strength to distance myself from Arson as Dr. Kunny demanded. And did I have the strength to even consider his advice of putting him into one of those institutions the doctors can’t seem to shut up about. But truthfully, the world didn’t give a fuck if the strength was there in me or not.

For my selfish ways to come around and open the blinds in my eyes to let me see the scope of his condition in the light of day, it took him to lay there at the corner downtrodden that night: sucked-alive of every inch of light, of every aspect of life that night.

—

That was the night of putting an end to something. How did that something between us even start; why in the world have I stayed and held on?

Trust me, it would take a lifetime to make me believe in the soulmate bullshit. Whatever Arson is to me or evoked in me has nothing to do with my ancestral beings, light cousins, star family or whatever. At that damn school field he was kicking sand as the “retarded boy” who rumours about would never stop filling the stuffy middle school corridors. After a couple “Pssst”s that I’d hissed, he was approaching me with wide, emerald-like green eyes lit up with bewilderment. He said his name was Arson. I said I already knew and kept staring at those eyes for what they were– free from the opinions of the actually retarded people around us. 

Looking back, the reason to why I am devoted forever in perpetuum is but a mystery to me still; Yet, know that I am not a volunteer; I am not the player of my puppet in this game in which my body blindfoldedly walks at the edge of the cliff, following Arson who’s led downwards by his retrogate mind.

I pitied him and that’s already established. I pitied him but this reason is yards-a-far from sufficient because he had been my companion and the root of my strength with which I stand today as myself. Yes, it might have been in the way that his birth parents refused to take responsibility for him, in the way that at age eleven he ended up in his abusive uncle’s household where I shared every inch of the pain with him even though it would take a blade to shut open his mouth. It might have been that my divergent appearance and interests as an elementary schooler drew me to him who was just another victim of a stuck up bully. There were so many eyes who looked at us individually with so much judgment and with so much contempt that after we united, there was finally one complete image of “retards” to feast their eyes and fill their mouths with.

I remember the day when one of Arson’s neighbors cornered me as I was making my snuck-out way out of his uncle’s apartment. In the core memory, she waves her index finger in my face. 

The air is chill because it is right after dawn; the crows yelling and the wind blowing. The cold slaps me in the face and at the moment, I think it’s what I must have needed the most.

She is a face I saw watching through stained windows and for the first time, I see her opening her mouth. But oh is she fast, is she eager. Her mouth knows not how to shut. Moments pass, I stand there and with my aching feet, I let my concentration yield itself away to the lady’s appalling teeth: The gruesome blend of yellow and brown; weak, shredded. How many packets of cigarettes does it take for you to live your life away confined in your balcony? You acquire some information about me and Arson and ardently makeup the rest with your nonsense, don’t you now?

Arson said he’d been left hungry yet another night. My jacket with which I had wrapped a dozen of leftover garlic bread is smelling and I want out right now– I want out of my body– I want out of the face of this unjust gruesome earth.

She is placing one word after the other in such haste that it almost feels as if she’s afraid I’ll run. She thinks I’m somewhat slow, stupid rather, so she still spends a considerable effort in being comprehensive. I’m convinced that she believes this is why I am with Arson: I must be ill in the head myself to accompany him. 

It feels funny; it confuses me vastly to try to figure out what makes this stranger think that I require someone like her to tell me what is best for me and urge me to stay away.

The corner of my eye catches a crow and grabs on it. The crow takes my mind to wander and I’m flying. Counting the colors of rooftops: Flaking red, flaking yellow, freshly painted white, flaking blue. Flaking flaking blue.

I land back to him. People think it is just empty up there where in fact Arson’s mind never seizes to stop. The abstract concepts and ideas chase after him until he’s lost the way back. Arbitrary details steal his utter attention in most cruel, most greedy ways, and the imagination that never leaves him seeing A as A, that always fills a blank white slate with versicolor visions from an outer world…
Everything we accept as normal he questions as the least normal: His eyes open in awe in the exploration of new colors and mind races for their meaning;
His fingers grasp and gribble the trunk of a tree and his mind gets surmounted by the colors of a butterfly which would normally evoke a huff in us and nothing more.

All such visions and thoughts consumed him; they consumed consumed and consumed until that night when on that blank wall flaking paint, there was too much to see that he saw nothing at all;
When all that racing in his mind left me with nothing of him. 

And so I had to send him far away, to the clinic.