A Story About Metaphors
The green light means it’s okay to cross the street, but if it’s a light green like the way your eyes are a light brown, you have to cross backwards, and if it’s a dark turquoise you have to sing your least favorite song and flail your arms, and if it’s not green but also not any other color and instead is projecting stars into the sky, you have to roll across like a log while everyone else gets out of their cars and jumps over you like deer, barking like dogs, and clapping whenever they feel like they’re going to accidentally step on you.
The red light means you need to start typing and once it starts blinking you can close your eyes and trust your fingers to convey what you want them to even though the keys will move and the pitch will change — once the red fades into pink, you can open your eyes and open your lungs and breathe the notes in the air into your diaphragm and start the process of converting them into bars of compressed soap. When the light clones itself and becomes two beady, red eyes slowly opening and closing, you need to stop typing, stop breathing, let the sweat roll off your fingers and start stretching your arms to the sky.
The black light is an ever present reminder that the universe can’t be seen, but also once you’ve seen it you can never unsee it. If it flickers, run. If it dilutes to a cheap purple light instead, break your stomach open, dissect your chest, reach inside and finger out the precious gemstones and pearls your body formed — beautiful layers of emotion surrounding awful, terrific moments of life — throw them at the light. If the light breaks, you win. If the light cracks, you win. If your shit rebounds and rolls back to you, shiny and forgiving, you win. If the light turns off, sit down in the bleak, black silence until it is no more.
