ONLY AN INSECT IN HOW SHE MAKES YOU FEEL/IMPENDING LIKE DOROTHY ON THE AIRPLANE/POLYAMOR
Waking up in the middle of the night was nothing unusual. Even needing a moment to situate my sense of direction was precedented, if uncommon. But as vision set in I realized that the darkness in my room somehow held a blue tint approximating that of an iPhone backlight, and this would have been remarkable, if I had been in any position to wield language. Animalistic, I only felt revulsion towards such a logically wrong stimulus, and swiftly turned my head in the hopes of a change. I was granted one, my eyes locking on the lamp that I had in typical fashion left on, yet its light was hardly extending beyond its bulb, and its warm orange had been replaced with something adjacent to maroon. My head unthinkingly reoriented to its original position, once again escalating my anxiety by making my eyes land on her, crouched on the foot of my bed.
The way she appeared was more like a cue blip than a badly edited jump cut. That was an attempt to pay tribute to her early 20th century air — maybe it would be more accurate to say she appeared like the term “gif”, encircled, summoned to watch over a paused gif, more than she appeared like the inevitable reset of that gif. But this paints her as too common. Something in my brain registered “night terror”, yet she was wearing a smile that said “night terror” in the same way a netsavvy singer-songwriter might wear a shirt saying “big rock star” while playing to a room of eight to ten familiar supporters. You see how my prose stylings dissolve just trying to capture her? Her dress seemed leather, baroque, impressively severe, painfully yellow in its outline, illegibly black in itself, resolutely constituting a hole in the darkness even as this darkness lost its previous aspiration towards machinic blue. Her flesh was pale, inconsistent, hardly registered as skin. Her hair was ostensibly mauve, but I hardly trust my memory here. She began to explain her reason for appearing. I’m sure her mouth moved, but I was hardly watching it, the way I hardly watch a mouth in a subtitled film or anime.