I AM NOT

What I found in the cracks between those yellow tiles installed in the late 1950’s is a mystery. The sight of it made me weep diamonds. They trickled down my cheeks like tiny crystal ants, their antennae twitching observantly as they made their way over the dunes of my cheek bones and crawled around behind my earlobes to march in a line down the nape of my neck, moistening the forgotten curls of hair hidden there.
I will never tell you what I saw. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. They say that it’s possible that the ancient Greeks couldn’t perceive color in the way that we do. This theory is based on certain curious passages in the Iliad which suggest that the sight of the author was somewhat different from the sight of the modern man, used to sitting upon his sofa watching Spike TV on a high definition plasma screen television, his Bermuda shorts catching the survivors after he crams greasy handfuls of brittle potato shavings into his open mouth, pupils dilated attentively as crimson arcs of blood splash across the screen before him.
When Homer looked out at the arid cliffs of the Mediterranean, he saw something more akin to black and white, only we haven’t got the words to accurately describe what he actually saw, and at this point we have even less imagination than words, so you see, ours is a desperate situation. We will never actually uncover the secrets captured in the blink of a Greek eye.
For that same reason I cannot tell you about the landscapes that I have visited in the lines of grout near the kitchen sink, nor about the craters around the abysmal mouth of the drain. I look at the mouths of the humans nearest to me and watch them move in complicated contortions of tongue, lip and teeth, and in the end all that I can hear is my own whispered interpretations, like a gentle Zephyr blowing through my mind, bringing back to me notions tied to my earliest perceptions. Sensations tangled in my fathers beard and the sunlight glinting off the window frames to shimmer on the gossamer web of a green spider.
These things outside trigger a little pop fizz inside, a torrent of psychic and physical sensations. The muscles in my own face jerk and contort correspondingly as part of this miniature animal dance. The flicker of an eye lid, the slow rise of brows, mouth curled up at the corners, a flash of teeth.
No, I have no idea what any of it really means. It transpires automatically. I like it better when I put the scene on mute so that nonsense is the only sense left to me. I cut the line between the outside and the inside. What I see on the screen of the mind will not make me jump and dance. I will dance when I say "Dance!" All of this human twitching and confusion is draining, a waste of the liquid fire running in figure eight from prow to stern of the biological space ship I inhabit.
With this vessel, which as far as I can actually tell, despite the appearance of others that would seem to be of like kind, is the only one in existence, or at least the only one I can influence directly, I voyage into an arena of color and sound that combines to create a chaotic roar, (we call this noise) and when the anarchy reaches critical mass it becomes silence. It is like turning the television on to watch the snow and hear the static as you meditate in a straight back chair, a mechanism for blotting out the more distinct noises of your neighbors talking through the paper thin walls and car horns bleating outside the window. All of those very distinct sounds which call me into human existence, I drown them out with the hiss and roar.
I do this to lessen the great shock that I will no doubt experience when I die and discover that I was never human at all. Why insist that I am human now? Oh it’s true, I am in a human spaceship now, but that does not mean that I am a human space ship.
I am not.
I am.
I am NOT.
When they see me in those places that I cannot describe to you, they, the indescribable others, say, "Welcome back Not! We’re so glad to have you!" Then all of us Nots crash together and howl, bouncing one off of another, creating a din that can only be appreciated by the initiated Maenad, who standing barefoot on the forest floor goes stock still, eyes widening as she feels us crashing in through the open portal in her chest, mud smeared upon her bare arms, twigs lodged in her hair, crystal ants crashing down to shatter upon her naked breast.