souvenirs from a car crash | prologue
There are a million different ways I can start this story, and of those one million ways, 999,999 of them are wrong. First sentences are so important They’re first impressions, and I’m trying too hard to find the perfect one to begin my story. I just need to get the words right. Not because I want you--the reader-- to like what I’m writing, rather because she--Marilyn Delilah Ellis--got me thinking too hard about creation and she always did care more about my writing than most people.
I’m going to tell you this story--my story--from the moment I met Marilyn Delilah Ellis, and by the time I am done, this whole thing will read like a perfect circle.
The grayscale entered my mind so gradually that I didn’t notice until it was too late. I was stuck with the bare minimum and my eyes forgot how to see. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that darkness that takes over. You feel less and less like yourself, until you don’t even know who you are anymore. Blank is the new black. This is who I am now, you think, but that was your first mistake. This feeling, this beautifully horrible white sky full of clouds so thick you can only trust that the sun is where you think it is, that’s what it’s like to be you now. Anybody who gets too close knows you’re full of nothing, and you’d toss just about anything and anyone into the void just to feel a little less like that. That’s who I was.
Being that person wasn’t like being anybody else. I saw weapons in unlikely places. There were pills in the cabinet above the bathroom sink that would kill the thoughts in my head and bleach in the cupboard below to drown the butterflies in my stomach, shiny things in kitchen drawers with sharp edges and I tied my shoes with nooses every morning. I was my own worst enemy. There were guns everywhere, and I was trigger happy on particularly bad days.
Of course, that all changed one fateful autumn night in the basement of that shitty yellow house at 914 Division Avenue. Thinking back on it, the circumstances were shitty, and we’ve both agreed that, in some fucked up way, we’re glad things played out the way they did.
I didn’t start thinking in metaphors until she came into my life. She made me think in color. I saw the world as it should be seen. Hues and shades and tints and auras surrounded us on a day to day basis and so many of us forget to admire the scenery. She taught me how to seize the day by its throat and watch it die.
However, this is not a love story, at least not in the way you’d think, and she did not fix me. Nobody was going to save me but me; she just pointed me in the right direction. She provided the kind of encouragement that I needed. She watched as I put a metaphorical gun to my head and sprayed the walls with my pastel mess.