New Paints

Trish feels heavy against the pillow. Her limbs are weights too heavy for her bones to move at this moment. Through the haze of exhaustion, her skin registers the breeze from the ceiling fan pushing her deeper into the mattress. She's trapped. Her brain is betraying her, making her a hostage who is conscious but unable to move to freedom. And, like the hostage, she watches her capture through bleary eyes. Her brain is going about it's work, indifferent to her needs and focused intently on sorting the materials in it's hands. Abandoned in this world of flickering images that she can neither slow down or sort out, Trish lays helplessly and waits for mercy.

From her spot, Trish watches the strange process before her. Thoughts become a physical form, ghostlike images that cloud the air around her mind. Images, smells, thoughts, and experiences are rushing to report to duty, answering an inaudible call that had gone out earlier that day. She can hear flickers, clicks, murmurs fill the area; her brain plucking each of them from the air to sort them into piles. It plucks an image, turns it, tries to fit it against another, discards it for another. This process is repeated until the fit is seamless. Unrelated words are answering the call now, creating a chaos of noise that is colliding with the whirs and pops already coming from the complicated process before her. Trish witnesses her mind pluck them quietly from the air and sort them into the appropriate piles. Detached and distant she considers the process; she can't seem to figure out the ordering system in use here.

Her brain pauses briefly, Trish pushes the advantage and rolls onto her other side. Her eyes are trained to search out the red numbers on her alarm clock. By the time the numbers register her mind is back in control and is focused intently again. It's moving through the images and sounds now, traveling around bodies, tunneling between relationships. It grabs moments from years past and swirls them with minutes from the yesterday. Trish watches the moments spin so fast they finally merge and become a new color. Sounds are ground with words creating a glittering substance. Her brain plucks more and more from air around it, tediously clipping, matching, merging them into miraculous new substances Trish has never really seen before. It seems to be putting together a new pallet - a new stock of paints to work with. Textures are being recombined, resorted, reassembled - her brain painting a new map from the ragtag army of new and old images and thoughts.

Hours pass. Her brain frantically continues it's work and Trish begs it to just let the day end. Can't her mind understand that she needs to function in the morning? Does it think this is productive? She grows frustrated with the endless shuffling it seems so intent on. She wants control of her body back. She needs to be allowed to sleep or at the very least be able to get up and distract herself. Instead, she's being forced to lie here and watch this insane alchemy. She whimpers quietly and her brain coldly rebukes her, like a scolding parent who is trying to think and will not tolerate any distraction. She's been confined to her room and has been commanded to stay there until it is appropriate for her to come out. She cowers back and surrenders.

The flickers continue to arrive. They pour in and are tossed up, then crushed into one paste or another in her brain's mortar and pestle. Her mind's fingers reach out, snatch a bit of this and a pinch of that. Dazed, Trish lays and just watches, long since giving up figuring out the reasoning behind the process. Her brain seems to appreciate the ceded control and whirls double in it's efforts. Finally, a tornado of tugs, pinches, aches, pains, wounds and victories all twist together violently. They shudder for a minute, the mixture is alive and trying to determine if this is a stable match. Finally it heaves itself into stillness and becomes a calm pool. The breaks and tears that have occurred in years past are settling down. They fit against each other, one void accepting the excess of another. Her brain steps back, seemingly satisfied thus far, and begins to paint a salve over the new images and thoughts, soothing them back into stasis. The new colors seem to be a perfect match though Trish can't quite make them out; the vibrations coming from the new mixtures heat her skin, lulling her further into complacency. She is being seeped in things she doesn't yet have a feel for. There is an unfamiliar coating of recombined understandings - strengths and weakness are mixed together to create a new salve for her new wounds.

Trish's brain stops, panting and weary from the intense focus. The silence is mind-numbing after the chaos that preceded it. Trish wearily regards her mind with a measured look when she feels it letting her go free. The hostage situation ends with the sharp bursts from the alarm by her head. She rolls, hauls herself up out of bed and forces her way into the shower. She recognizes this familiar feeling of trust. Her job is to go about her day and trust that this new skin will become comfortable. As time passes, the newly combined elements into a new fine wine. Her brain will step back and the two of them can relax in her patio chair,sipping on wine and enjoying a new view of her life.

But first a shower. It's gonna take a while to get used to this.