green coma

     the carpet in your room is green. the mattress is a shallow affair which affords a near horizontal view across the expanse. it is a disconcerting green, perhaps because of its vivacity: one that undulates and breathes, whose soft, rippling sighs seem always, as of late, to move toward the same corner; the corner where the green has come slightly detached from the junction of floor and wall which before it so uniformly swallowed. you turn and look out the window. the sky is cobalt blue and would, under more comfortable circumstances, be an excellent compliment to the green. right now they make each other pale and disquieted.
     it is a familiar green, one of the forests of your childhood; the color of the light that clung to your shoulders when called to dinner, muddy and jubilant, in the first throws of sunset in late july. this green is, however, unnerving. not only because in the last 36 hours it has assumed an uncanny directionality that continually draws to that corner - an increasing geometric impossibility - but also because it is a green you associate with exteriors: growth, lushness, vegetable density. it is a green that, you are coming to believe, has no place existing inside.      further complicating your once solid understanding of greens is the lone palm tree stark in the persistent white light that dispels all illusion of depth. this palm, possessing only the yellow and withered green of perpetual struggle, is a foreign and terrifying element of your current existence. you have encountered palms often in the past, in pictures, movies, exotic vacations, and they all sighed with a lulling sense of relaxed adventure. but there is neither relaxation nor adventure in this one's withered and drying fronds, its height, solitude and the way it bends in even the slightest breeze. it is upsetting in a very fundamental way: the juxtaposition of it with the inside green serves as a constant reminder of your current situation, full of instability and contradiction, improbabilities and nonsense. somehow you have to reconcile the fact that this particular palm exists outside - independent of postcard fantasies - while the lush green of childhood forests remains inside, refusing to budge.
     abandoning the palm you return inevitably to the green. its persistent waves draw you toward that single place where a wilting philodendron squats miserably and the green now floats like a coiled serpent in patient anticipation. just under that subtle edge are the slim planks of a hardwood floor (intended to be beautiful) naked and irritated, silently waiting in misuse. you used to think of that brotherhood of boards with kinship and longing, imagining them suffocating under all that green, purpose perpetually unfulfilled. you've often felt like that, smothered in the shadow of something far more attractive than your plain self. part of you kind of liked that, it afforded time to contemplate the changes in your relationship with greens.
     the lack of resistance in those wooden planks is frightening. they were so easily exposed, so readily pried, manipulated, redirected in their essential purpose. you question your own stability.
     there is so much more to worry about now than just green. you crave knowledge, to unearth and devour it from beginning to end and lie wasted and empty, possibility sacrificed for the unrelenting gratification of choice. instead, like the boards, you succumb - because you would still, despite it all, like a little more time to think about green, to pretend that everything is the way it has always been: unpleasant, tempting, but not unsure (the future, while not necessarily enticing, could still be conjectured) - and you turn again to glare at the palm.


 
 

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