After a while you learn to tell when colors are pretending. You’ll see them everywhere: violent streaks of amethyst, lustrous tongues of jade looking like radioactive angel vomit splattered against walls. Sapphire winding around itself like a mad scientist’s depiction of a double helix, writhing and thrashing and breaking apart like a many-headed hydra, strangled through its own dark and unpredictable fury but always somehow managing to rise phoenix-like from the abyss inside itself it barely manages to contain—you’ll know. You’ll see it leaking out of the intricate crystal structure it builds to imprison its passion. You’ll see, and it will revolt you, but you won’t be able to stop watching. And when you stop being disgusted you will want more.
I promise now to never say that this is a good idea, what you are going to do someday. But I know you are going to do it. So here’s how:
Follow the colors. They won’t lead you in any kind of straight line; they’re far too clever for that. If you try to follow them like you’d follow signs or arrows they’ll only lead you in circles. Yes, it’s far better for you in the long run, but you won’t believe that. You’ll be frustrated. You’ll grind your teeth and bite your lip and your nails will dig into your palms so far that they’ll bleed. You’ll want to go to the place where they live, so listen: You’ll only get there if you become insane. If you abandon every logical structure, every concept of beginning and end, so that every second feels like an eternity on your skin, so you hear texture and bleed vision and everything in your head becomes hopelessly abstract and self-referential. If you’re going to follow their convoluted and recursive pathways there is no other way.
Simply allow yourself to be fascinated and absorbed. Give yourself over to abandoning all unease and allowing yourself to be possessed. Let dark-bright tendrils lick at your wrists like a thousand kitten tongues, and remind yourself not to fight. Give yourself over as something soft seeps upwards into your mind, massaging your spine into contortions you never imagined possible.
Reader, I may not know who you are, but I know where you’ll go. Inwards, always inwards, into the place inside yourself that still remembers what it was like to be a tiny star-speck in seemingly infinite space. Into the colors of nausea and delirium. Every author writes for an intended audience, no? Well, here’s my secret: I left those winding trails you’ll follow when I dove into myself. I painted the walls, I scrawled on the trees, I secreted a glistening slime of knowledge, and now I am planting this seed in your mind. And you read on, you think with relief it is not me, and you will believe this until it is too late and I’ve woven round you the dark threads in which I too am entangled. You have already fallen in love with half-heard whispers and tenuous promises of something blindingly true and realer-than-real. You’ve found it on shelves and in sounds that make your spine shudder. I will never say this is a good idea, what you are about to do. But then you’ve already begun, haven’t you?
