People pass by me all the time. They judge me right away. I see it in their fleeing eyes as they walk past me, their path curving slightly to the side, away from me, so they avoid getting too close, thinking maybe I would grab their ankle and burp out a dirty joke about banging in a staircase or munching their pubic hair. They think I don’t notice that deviation, that half arc detour around me. Maybe they don’t even notice it themselves, their body performing an unconscious, self-preservation automatism. They think I’m a drunk and an idiot and a loser. That I probably smell like old sweat and cheap wine, some of it probably regurgitated on my lavish, torn “S’life is good” printed t-shirt and forming a nasty patch of reddish puke. Why is “s’life good” anyway? Why is that spelled out on a t-shirt? They must wonder that too, those who risk a glance at me. Well, I never knew. Sorry to disappoint. This t-shirt doesn’t make any fucking sense. That’s why I love it so much. The walkers are right about some things though. I am a drunk and a loser, and I spend my days sitting on my steps, chain-smoking Viceroy’s, a bottle of tequila never too far, ready to serve, hidden behind my always opened apartment door on Gordon Street, Verdun. But I’m not an idiot. And I know how to watch. I see these people as they would never imagine someone could. If they possessed the ability to sit behind my eyes, at the wheel, driving my brain around, making sense of what my strangely wired optic nerves perceive… they would either go insane or become desperate, hardcore addicts tearing their eyes out begging for more. Maybe that’s what happened to me a long time ago. Both these things. But my vision is my main perk now, it had to become a perk, so that I wouldn’t die too fast and could learn to appreciate it for what it is. My ride to both heaven and hell, paved with colorful schematics of people’s core, their drive, the essence of what it means to feel. More than that, what it LOOKS like to feel. Anybody’s turning point can become my fantasy, my drive. My design, in whatever way I shape it inside my head. They paint it for me as I watch them, some of their vapor I could blissfully die for.

Not one colorful body passed by me today. Shame. Really boring. I know they often look the same: gray and bland and uniform. Static and unwavering. Of course, they feel. I can see fluctuations and small color variations, a narrow range of shades, usually. Shapes form and shift around their shells, but the movements remain inherently slow. Passionless. And it is passion that feeds me. Still, I need to stand watch, so I don’t miss a gem, a rarity, a being bright enough to allow my brain to rejoice and feast for days on the nebulous torments of its entrails. I’ve only seen a handful of these treasures in my life, each one of them transforming me, turning my brain into an ecstatic, overflowing jar of pleasure and pain, a sweet torment if I'm poetic. It'll all worth it, so damn worth it, and the booze helps. It fuels my gift, allows it to reach out much farther. Amplifies the shapes and the colors and the waves, makes them burst out in pulsing spirals of vivid emotions, stronger than the deadliest white waters and just as dreadfully beautiful. I know, it sounds like one of a drunkard’s many excuses to get high, but just watch me not give a shit about what the empty passersby think of it.

This morning I caught a glimpse of an attractive shape. He/she was walking on Wellington, too far to my right, not engaging in my little street. I was disappointed, but it still got me hung up for a good couple of hours as I tried to relive what I saw, piecing together my own personal imagery of that person’s emotional landscape. Usually, I can make out genders, but this one was undefinable. Or rather, it was in transit. Changing. The color turquoise, filling up the body like a life bar in a video game, covering more than two-thirds of the shell. Appeasement. He/she recently acquired a certain sense of security regarding their own future. But it still showed fragility, hiding beneath a constantly renewing will, an indispensable strength without which his / her whole sense of self would crash against walls of glass, cutting everything inside until only shreds of tissues and bloody strips of skin remained. I saw impatience, too. A mind starving for self-completion. It looked like a wavering whirlwind spinning around itself, its solid core hard as a diamond encased in a shell of sticky water, flowing in languid concentric circles, steadily picking up speed. I was comforted by that vision. I think everything will be alright for that person, given just a bit more time. I cannot say that for everybody, unfortunately.

I remember Crimson and Gemini. Whatever happened to them I’m dying to find out. I haven’t seen her in three weeks. She was coming out of Gemini’s apartment with the one I named Steady, her boiling insides flaring around her core, her raging heart’s arteries branching out to the rest of her body like an overloaded highway of exposed nerves, stripped bare and raw, desperate to connect to just about anything that could stick. That’s why I named her Crimson. She’s always burning, consumed by her thoughts, her feelings, her rage and her love. Always red as blood, fighting for and against both pleasure and pain. Maybe she’s not that different from me. That’s what I thought the first time I saw her. Maybe she will become me, eventually, when her insides finally melt.

Three weeks ago, she looked like the painting of a car crash a second away from happening, sketched by a bipolar precog doing his best to illustrate what the wreck could look like when the metal would stop shrieking, when the fire would burn out, charred carcasses frozen in grotesque postures and devoid of flesh the only traces of life remaining. But the crash hadn’t happened yet. It may never happen. But for the very first time in my life this day, I saw patterns and shapes reach out of someone’s shell. Her turmoil extended outside of her body, fumy volutes of red and orange vapors bursting out and floating around her like a coating made of helicoidal twirling flames, dying and getting reborn fractions of seconds away from each other in a fascinating dance of passion and fear, their colors and shapes entwined together like chromosomes.

I figured out what it meant then. Her turning point was nearing. No, more than that. She was standing on the edge, and it was all but a small matter of time before she jumped and either break all the bones in her body or conjure a cage able to contain the inferno that licked her balance away piece by piece. Insanity and destruction, or a temporary comfort paved with the illusion of stability, the howling dark never too far, prone to creep out of any road she would walk… I only needed to watch her internal makeup for a second to figure that out. The repeating nature of her emotions. But temporary relief is still a relief, right? A cage she could build, yes, a cage an intense enough fire could melt away, again.

When she left with Steady, her vaporous flames still reaching out to Gemini like a thousand ghostly arms clinging to the edge of a lifeboat in a vein but hopeful leap for solace, I realized that she wasn’t the only captivating one of the group. I got too busy with her to notice Gemini’s colors and shapes. He quickly went back inside his apartment, but I could still see inside him as he leaned against his door, both his minds telling him to take opposite actions. The dichotomy in him was brutally visible, two people in the same head, the border between them bright and sharp as a triple coated sushi knife. No blurriness whatsoever and clear as day, I could see that. He was something entirely new. They both were. Now, two gems in the same day, I oughta have been dreaming, or gotten way too high on tequila to make out reality from fantasy. That’s what I thought to myself then. The intensity of them would knock me out for days, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t pass that up, so I kept on watching, boozing up like a sink so I could better see and sniff and suck in every detail, every color, every shape of emotion they oozed out for me.

Without surprise Gemini’s colors were antithetic. Light green to the left, the darkest shade of blue to the right. A creature of extremes if I ever saw one. At this very moment, his twin minds were screaming at each other. The dark blue one won’t let him feel his own self. The other wanted to feel too much. I saw both heads biting the other off in what could only be a perpetual cycle of mutual destruction, opposite forces pushing and pulling on the same rope, each side never letting go, never granting the other a break. Gemini’s heads were eating each other as he slouched down against his door, pushing out of him one after the other, screaming, biting, dangerously stretching the boundaries of his shell like distorted clay demons throwing themselves against the membrane of the underworld, wailing for freedom in anger and agony. He’s not looking back at the one he just let go of. He probably still feels Crimson’s vapor, but the conquering part of him only wants to make it disappear. The defeated one desperately aches to inhale it until it fills every cell in his body.

I remember he made me want to smash my bottle of tequila on my own head. And on his. But I couldn’t blame him for whatever he was unable to let himself express. At that moment, I knew he had no choice but to force both his selves to feel nothing at all, using the best tool man has created for himself. The same tool I use, for a different purpose. I also knew he couldn’t tear himself apart forever, and one way or another, one of his heads will have to take control, for better or for worse. Right there and then, I saw the latter as a more probable outcome. He wasn’t on the turning point yet, then, but he was walking closer and closer towards his edge. I hope I see him again. And her. Reminiscing has made me sleepy, and I need to get back in while the memories of the one I baptized Swirl are still fresh on my mind. If I do it right, these will feed me for days.

They both walked out of his apartment around 11pm. I was still lurking about, waiting impatiently to get a better view of them and find out whether or not their colors had changed since that time two months ago. I hadn’t seen them get in, and I was only gone for five minutes. The timing sucked alright this evening. And apparently, not just for me, if I relied on what I was seeing in front of me then. Gemini looked calmer, and Crimson’s dense layout showed patches of light yellow overlaying her usual redness. I saw it then. He’s on the turning point too. I see something building up inside of him. A future. Something beautiful, I think, solid, able to resist Crimson's destructive fires, contain them and why not, tame them. The timing is not right yet though. Not quite. Just a little longer.

I see people on their turning point is part of my skill. The best part. I see conflict riddling their body and mind, erratic current and waves of dissonance crashing against each other to annihilation. Over and over and over again. It always looks different, but it always feels the same: brutal, beautiful, intoxicating. It can be horribly deformed and painful. It can be as gorgeous as the sky. Different brushes, different paintings, all of them cherished and etched forever inside of my relentlessly hungry brain.

I wonder if Crimson and Gemini will ever show their insides to each other. Even I can’t see that. Still, their passion has quenched my thirst.

The refectory was quiet but busy, as it usually was. Shadows were sitting around big rectangular tables, a faint yellowish light drawing sharp glowing edges around the worn out but sturdy carpentry. She made her move and went out the door. It was time to leave. All the signs were there. No one looking in her direction, no one speaking a word to her. Sometimes an awkward glance coming from an undefined form hiding in her blind spot. But she probably imagined it, she thought. It was quite evident that no one was paying attention, not directly anyway. An awkward indifference. (Again. And again.) She didn't remember exactly where she had to go. Perhaps some vague notion of a mission, forgotten like a hazy dream fading fast over the morning’s alarm.

She passed the threshold and something winded through to her left side. A fugitive presence (human?), quick as sound. She turned around and saw him walk away, muttering something she barely understood.

“…don’t wanna come

                   "alright…

                        "…..go to the other side anyway.

                                       The papermakers…”

"Wait."

She turned around and reached for his arm, but he was too fast. He was storming straight in the opposite direction, his rigid stance definitive in its intention not to stop for anything or anyone. She rushed after him, not wanting to be ignored again, passed through like a ghost. And she made him stop, gripping his arm and forcing him to a face to face he was clearly uncomfortable with, given the effort he was making to avoid her slightly angry but interrogative stare.

“What did you just say to me?"She wouldn't usually engage in a conversation with a total stranger, especially in the vicinity of the refectory and its mass of undefined shadows aggressively looking through her. She barely knew these gray lands, after all. But there was something strangely familiar about this rude but curious apparition, and she had to dig out what it was, whether he liked it or not.

“I know you, don’t I?” She was trying to make eye contact, searching for a lock on his eyes, frowning her eyebrows and twisting her neck like a bird observing a curious, elusive creature.

But he wouldn't let her catch his gaze. His face was half turned to his left, a painful contraction of his brows visible as he lowered his head to the ground. His eyelids were almost sealed, and she could barely make out some of the white in the borders of his right eye.

“If you want to follow me, you can. Your decision”. With that, he turned his back to her, but stayed put.

“Why would I want to follow you?” (I never do.)

“You stopped me” He was right. Something about him made her react. Enough to establish a semblance of connection, no matter how awkward. “I tried to reach out to you just now …"

“You didn’t try anything, you just whispered nonsense and walked away. That’s hardly a mark of interest. Where is it you’re going anyway?”

“The hub on the other side.”

He folded his arms, raised his head from the ground and pointed his sharp angular chin to his left. It was the exact opposite direction of where she was thinking of heading. But at least, it still meant walking away from the refectory, which was enough for her. She still had no idea what her original purpose here was anyway.

“Are you coming or not?”

He didn't wait for a response. Turning away, he started walking again. Striding. Fast, skinny shadow casting an overly tall dark spot over the flat gray road. She went after him without bothering to figure out why. They were alone now, and the light was getting dimmer. There was a shimmer coming from the valley down to the left of the road. She thought it might be the river's stagnant water crying out for attention as it dissolved into the dawning night. She never actually did see the river, nor did she ever see water in the Gray lands. She just liked the idea of this place sustaining some geological life.

Some life at all? When looking back over the lands she had traversed since she came here, all she could ever see was the gray veil covering every place she had touched, walked through or seen. A gray veil that made everything disappear, even memories.

"Is this hub of yours far? I really don't want to be stuck outside the refectory at night."

The refectory never disappeared into the gray veil, she had noticed pretty early on. As much as she hated it, it was the only unchanging place she had found here. Yellow light, faded. Not gray.

He slowed down a little and let her catch up.

"I thought getting away from the refectory was what you wanted"

That was odd. Maybe he was just good at reading body language, which meant he had been observing her from somewhere around the refectory. At least, he wasn't a shadow like the others back there. Not entirely. That was enough.

"Yeah well…you're perceptive, I'll give you that. I still don't fancy spending a night cycle anywhere around here so...whatever, and wherever this hub is, we'd better reach it fast."

"It's not that far."

He hadn't bothered to look back at all during the whole exchange. Rude, again. She trotted after him anyway, still not having a clue why she was following him so naively as if the light-headed figure whose name he didn't tell nor did she ask, inspired some innate trust in her. Or a strange and irritating curiosity that she couldn't ignore or shake off. She decided not to dwell on those interrogations right now, satisfied enough to have succeeded in making him notice her, against his will, maybe, but still. (Better than before).

No one at the refectory had ever been paying attention, but he had spoken to her as if it was the most natural thing to do, albeit strange, unexpected, and yeah, totally tactless. His harsh manners during their first encounter, she was quickly forgetting. He noticed her, and a few words later, she was shadowing him to a vague and mysterious destination she knew would somehow change her life forever. The fear would come later, maybe, she thought. The gray lands had this ability to reassure and scare to death without forenotice and in the blink of an eye.

They walked for an undetermined amount of time, but it seemed to her that it all passed rather quickly. It could have been two minutes or thirty, she couldn't tell. Time seemed unreal here. She had no clear recollection of the path they followed and certainly could not put images on the landscapes they probably passed. “Turned to gray, as always”. She had been religiously staring at him, though, her mind strangely focused, buzzing with questions. He wasn’t gray. But she was convinced that he wasn’t coming from the refectory either. Was there any other settlement here? A real haven perhaps? Must be far, far away beyond the gray hills, where she’d never dared to wander.

The yellow figure stopped. She halted as well, remaining behind him. Opening up in front of them was the entrance to a tunnel. Or some cave. It wasn't a hub at all, or maybe the hub was inside? Not that impressive from here, though. A white arch over some eroded gray rocks, way too smooth and flat in several areas of its surface to look natural. Tired matter. The cold light now dominating the distant, barely visible sky was not helping in making this view any more tangible. Or hopeful.

The road came to an end, and she couldn't see any other path, not to the left or the right. Behind her the landscape was blurry, and there was no sign of the refectory anymore. Good. The veil had fallen on the path back, as expected.

He was still in front of her, not speaking. She should ask for his name; it was the proper thing to do. Somehow that idea came off just as bizarre as their surrounding environment. He plunged into the dark arched corridor, and she decided to follow closely on his elongated footsteps. She was quickly fully engulfed in the cavern's deep dark gob, which swallowed what little light remained from outside. That opening did resemble a mouth, she thought while crossing its threshold. Displaying an irregular outline of pointy rocks acting as teeth, all facing inwards, stretching out to try and reach the center of an imperfect sphere. That vision should have terrified her. But somehow, she didn't feel threatened at all. Special circumstances, perhaps. She guessed that's what these do to someone.

“More special than you think." His murmur startled her from her reverie. “Let’s move on. Don’t withdraw.”

“What? What do you mean withdraw, I’m right here! And I can barely see you”. 

Her eyes were just now getting accustomed to the new kind of light the cave was casting. "And how did you …”

“You think too much. It’s loud.”

The last word resonated faintly like a wet trail of burning leaves in a cold cave, muffled and surreal as he disappeared deeper into the cavern's jaws. Maybe he hadn't even said that aloud for all that she could tell. There really was no way to be sure. And how could he even have guessed what she was thinking? No way. But then again rules didn't apply here in the gray lands.

She stepped further into the dark, eager to catch up to him, hoping he would still exist on the other side. She dreaded for him to be yet another figment of her imagination, another vanishing figure playing her from the foggy maze of her mind. Maybe she would remain lost here, dampness and darkness her only companions until she’d finally wake up. If she ever did. (Dreaming this?)

A couple of steps later her vision started to clear, allowing her to slowly take in her surroundings. She was inside. Still air, no movements. Quiet. That mouth-like antechamber had seemed way too long to cross, deep tubular corridor leading straight to the stomach of a rocky ancestral beast, conveying that disquiet feeling of being inside a digestive tract, their substance slowly broken down into nutrients. (Feed me. Please feed me).

The ground inside was whiter, plush looking squares of concave, thick, rubber-like flooring, soft under the foot. It felt like stepping onto a parterre of vinyl pillows that seem to breathe when sat on, slowly exhaling a wheezing breath of old rank air. She remembered sitting on pillows like these in her ma’s room, back when she still took the time to visit her on Sunday afternoons. (No more Ma). She can’t remember her Ma’s face or the sound of her voice, but she does remember the pillows and the stillness. Eyes fixed, unable to blink. Mouth opened, unable to speak. A little hard on the ass they were, these bland pseudo cushions. She hated them as much as she hated that room. But all in all, she’d never stayed quite long enough to really start noticing the growing pain in her backbone. The tension in her neck. The physical pain was never the reason she left…

Thoughts for another time, she thought. Another reality.

Memories could come back later, maybe...