Light Black Black Light

There is a blackness, though it’s light or transparent. It’s thin black. It’s smooth black, a rectangular, shiny plane stretched out so taught and hard along the back wall. Behind it, and behind the wall, is the high counter to the place where everything warm, messy, and vibrant happens. It is where cooking happens, preparing, eating, talking, walking, cleaning, decaying, coloring happens. It is where sitting and being happens, disposing, grinding, wrapping, unfolding, cutting happens. It is where heat and moisture come together and change everything.

The black fleshes out in front of it all. It rests in deep, cool silence, displays on its surface a grave space. There are lights on it, but it obscures the details.

On it, there is a lamp sitting on a shadowed table in front of a couch. On the couch is a family member, a brother, a warm body with brown hair and a churning, developing spirit. He laughs with the friend across from him on the other couch. The friend is not shown by the black sheet. Only the back of the brother’s neck is clear. His aforementioned hair color is known from past experience, not from the image. So is his heart known in this way.

And there are colored lights on an evergreen as small, dense globes. They are blue like glowing ice electricity, red long-fired coals, golden melted old-time coins, white starlight condensed and captured in glass, green magic forests—the leafed limbs of great trees twisted with dripping vines fusing them all together, and pink, like hot strawberry lemonade—a misfit, barely visible in the black, hidden in the piny branches known, too, from past experience. The branches are too dark to be seen in the black, hidden themselves. Toward the top (the top of what?) is a cascade of lace aglow and ethereal. She (!) is holding a modest but strong yellow-white light globe that is an Eye to me, but not an Eye at all. Clearly. 

Clearly? Is this a mistake? How could it be? What is the eye, wondering now, about what has happened here, there, in the light, in the black, in the I?

Then the windows toward the back (where is the back?) reflect small other pale yellow lights. These lights do not seem like eyes as the ethereal lace-rested light does, because there are so many of these ones together, embedded into again-known-but-unseen wreath-garland. The windows are black otherwise, counterparts to the black sheet that reveals them in the first place. The lights twinkle on top of panes, adorning them, draping down and doubling in reflection. They are bat-like, the doubled lights. They have become the tight eyes of phantoms still and silent in their black, deep cave. There are six eyes of three main bats visible in the windows. The rest of the lights do not turn to anything but cosmic glitter. Nothing but glittering dust--

_

And there are more images than just these. All can never be said. 

___

The longer I stare into the smooth, transparent, hard black, the more that I begin to see. My eyes adjust to limited light. My eyes focus. There is little more I am compelled to describe about what is on this shining dark frame. 

There is confusion growing also and at once. I hear family voices coming from behind it, behind the high counter wall. I see the mother’s upper body cut starkly at her chest and at the back part of her back. She moves, and now I cannot see her face. I turn my neck to see more, and in doing so, I see less of her still; but I glimpse through the black panel this time, for the first time. I see white, unmarked poster-board behind it. It is as two rectangular white pieces leaning between the high counter wall and the black slate. 

I see the black now just as a plain plane of glass. It is two-dimensional, less mystical. There is nothing on it. There is nothing it displays. There is the action out at the couches, and back in the warm area of happening and heat. There is the poster board behind the black glass. And so the lamp, the colored lights, the Eye-light and eye-lights go out, the couch-sitting brother and his friend fade. My eyes lose the sharpness they'd gained in looking on the surface. Now instead they focus on the uneventful two white rectangular boards behind it.

I stop everything, thinking about this all now. The computer screen next to me goes black, into sleep mode. The whole area darkens so I see even less-- both in and on the black glass against the wall.

I do not know what to say. I do know what to say. I notice the folding and repeating of words. I notice the words that are not noticed, and I hang on them. I dangle.

For the first and only time, and for the final time gazing tonight, I look at the glass, and I see my own mute, softened form, sitting. Momentarily, the lights, images, and reflections retreat to the background of my awareness—all not there. I see a glare on my pale gray-white eyes, their shine mixing with the black to make them calmer or detached.

I want to say one thing more after “detached.” But I don’t know what it is. How it is, I don’t know. I feel it but cannot harness it. And so it goes.

I look to the side, at nothing in particular. Peripherally, I catch the glass, the kitchen, my mother, the warmth, and I hear the voices from the couch. It is all in a mass. 

I end this. I go away from the endeavor. It is ended, and I will sleep soon. From many spaces, I enter deep space.