Pareidolia

Tonight's prompt was based on the concept of pareidolia and there were three images from which to draw. Stemming from that, @shells, @ferryman, @meejong and @littlesunflower wrote the following:

Within the waves I saw the colors of the future. With certainty, they weren't the colors of the present. How do you even name a color that doesn't currently exist? It's like finding a picture faded to black and white of an era you can't possibly understand, but somehow do.

I've seen these colors before, cycling through the abyss. Dreams plagued me even before I was drawn to Arkham. This godforsaken town and this University have brought me into darkness. My nightmares flicker in black and white, then vibrant color, and I awake more tired than when I began. I'm not sure what made me take this job at Miskatonic, but my mind wandered when I audited a lecture yesterday, and I sketched a rosetta with a thousand eyes. "Be not afraid," echoed in my mind, and I laughed out loud. Afraid is all I am anymore.

I crouched in my arrogance. Crouched in my fear. Walked at from the loch with hunters and deer. There was nothing to stop me. No boundaries I'd found. Just a rite and a snort and a savior unbound.

Winding down the road, holding myself together, I nod at the people around me, my birds of a feather. They’ve shared my wounds, known that same fear, and felt a pain so shear and yet unclear. At one point I’d thought no one had been burned by death, but now I know better, I know that that white static tends to fill everyone’s ears. We hear it and yet we don’t, it makes the world spin and our heads float.

But what makes the time pass and our stomachs bloat? Is that the morass left to the unenlightened? The detritus left to those who don’t seek to be heightened? What is a world where colors are blended into one another in a nightmarescape for the woke? Where the only reasonable answer is one more toke?

It was after one more toke that I found myself staring off. My eyes unfocused, unseeing meeting the gaze of the unseen. I crested waves of my crossfade, only becoming aware of the cramp in my hand when the inkpen ran dry. I look down at the torn paper of a spiral notebook; my sketch digs several layers deep in the paper. The abyss stares up from Mead college ruled, and I hear the whispers of old gods and madness.

I want you to scratch through the layers. To move the built up paint aside. To see me through the static and white noise. And yet there is nothing but me and a silent wave of nothingness and regret.

I’d tried. I fought hard during the war. I’d sacrificed everything I could to make it through. And yet I still lost the one thing I sacrificed for you. I’d bled, and dealt with sweat, and defended myself from rats. I hoped I wouldn’t die and that I’d see you again after hell had retreated to the underground, but I came out of the trenches to find that the gods had gotten to you. You’d spilt their blood, ambrosia filling the nearby streams, you’d patched yourself up after the gods had watered the flowers with your insides in retaliation, but you didn’t survive. It wasn’t until years later that I’d found out how close you’d been. How close I was. If I was smarter and quicker to understand my surroundings you would be in my arms, but you’re not. My arms are empty, my body is cold, and my heart has stopped beating.

The colors bled from the world in that moment I realized my future could never look like I’d envisioned. What is survival in a world that looks so different from the one I fought to maintain. What is the next step when my heart beats so faintly, contemplating rows of data in place of souls. How can I move forward without hope. Am I? Without hope?

I once heard that hope floats. I believe that's true, but there's an asterisk on that. Bodies float, too. Until they don't. Maybe we're all floating, bloating, hovering between living and not. Maybe we're just different hues waiting to mix into new pigments, inevitably fading to gray. Is this what madness is? Blurred lines and a slurry of paints, reality twists and turns in a spiral and down we all go. Through it all, this place is my only constant. Fear is my only companion. Oblivion awaits and insanity abounds. Hope does float before it rots, and this place is rotten.

Modern modems of art and reality And faith.

Then merge together something akin to heaven and hell

Art and unreliable faith.

The colors faded. Drifting in and out

Potters and painters and nothingness in the bleak abyss of white noise and static and comfort. The pigments fade in and out with lysergic images of here and now.

And we find faith in nothingness and drink and drug and the final collapse of sanity and prosperity and pain.