So I Turned It Off

There was once a boy who saw the world through very special eyes. He didn't see depth or fiction, illusion or grandeur. He saw no horizons or grayscales, or skyscrapers or dark corners. He saw lines. He saw a straight line leading from his feet to where he was going. Where that was, he was unsure, but that was irrelevant.

He made his way down, not noticing the people too far away from the line to be in his one dimensional universe. In real life, one might suppose it to be the equivalent of passing a stranger walking the other direction, on the opposite sidewalk across a one lane street. Not a great distance, no, not really. Maybe that stranger had something to offer. Maybe you had something to offer them. But the point is, to him, there was nobody, no stranger. No chance encounter of two minds so alike in fashion as to always want to meet and pair and eventually call it love.

None of those.

But he did come across a tree with an owl who spoke in rainbow tone. He met a man who sold balloons that smelled like strawberries. He also met a giant who didn't know he was a giant. The giant lived in trees, thinking nobody saw him. When the boy asked the giant to move, the giant was very astonished and asked how the boy could see him, hidden as he was in the thick foliage. The boy replied that the giant couldn't possibly be invisible as long as he knew where he was himself. The giant pondered this. Are you hidden if you know where you are? The boy gave him the strawberry balloon to ponder this, and went on his way.

He eventually reached a point where the line went straight up. Fancy it as he might, he couldn't bring himself to be walking on the vertical. It doesn't happen for boys like he or I. It just doesn't. But his mistake here was not noticing the real truth of the matter. You see in real life, he was up against a wall. He was in love with the idea of being whole almost as much as he loved to admit how flawed even his own schemes were. He was enamored with reaching out very, very slowly, and grabing the fabric of reality, and sanding it to a nice glossy finish. He then cuddled the reality and let it soothe him to sleep. He had met a girl, needless to say in such overt terms.

She thought he was beautiful, even for everything he wasn't. Especially for everything he wasn't in fact. Because she only saw a large expanse of space. She saw the lack of lines and had the possibility to go anywhere but where she was going. She saw colors and heard sounds and sometimes she even heard colors and saw sounds. But she didn't see him, and he didn't see her, until they bumped into eachother wholly on accident. He was busy trying to breathe water while she was trying to grow trees simply by commanding turtles to become trees. For all their big mistakes, they thought eachother beautiful. Invisible, but reaching for a lover in the dark, when fingers replace eyes, is never really an issue.

So he bought a car.

Now they both drive left. Not two dimensional Super Mario Brothers you can understand it right and left. No that's what they were doing before. Now they turned, faced the camera, and came right at you. They used foreshortening, and got bigger and bigger and now they're over your head and gone. The beauty of thinking is the absense of need for horizon lines, I suppose. He think's she's beautiful, and she thinks she can see his chest beating heavily in colors that don't even exist. I think that's an appropriate situation. Don't you?