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Saturday - Where Hearts Should Lie (Part 1) - Jacob Martinez

Common sense tells us that in order to really see the truth in someone, you’d have to konw them for years, a lifetime maybe. But common sense is wrong. Because sometimes all it takes is a look.

My life began five years ago, and I’m not talking about my birth-date, I’m talking about my life. Before that I only existed, and talked and laughed my way through existence. Of course I did not know I wasn’t alive back then. I had no clue. I won’t bother you with what I did then, because that is not important. Five years ago I met my friend ændɹu or rather, I was picked to be his friend, and he picked to be mine. By who isn’t really for me to know, and it doesn’t matter much in the end anyway. Someone who knew what they were doing.

Whether his life also began with the introduction of Her and me is unfair to say. He may regard his previous life very fulfilling. But he probably doesn’t. Before I introduce Her. The Her. The Her that is the subject and catalyst of this story, you’ll have to know what it was like without her which in itself is difficult to explain. It’s like seeing a painting that is so remarkable, so devestating, that it blows your socks off. It’s like that. Only the second before you see the painting. Like an overhead that is focused, but not quite. Enough to know that you may be missing something, but not enough to bother trying to see what it is.

It was the beginning of the beginning of my life, and labor pains were starting. The daunting nervousness, an uneasy feeling not only common with birth, but a simple fact of life. The first day. The first day in a new world, only unfamiliar faces staring back. It was The Dark Room. Do you want to know how it got it’s name? Simple. It was a room filled with darkness. Darkness so dark that at some point the darkness ceased to be dark and become perfect black. And so it was.

Chairs were arranged in a large circle, no tables, just chairs, so those who had brought bags were forced to stuff them under their seats. I had no bag. I looked out, through my new eyes. There were not many chairs left. I picked one of them, next to a beast, a man that could rip me in half if he was so inclined, though he was occupied by the music coming out of his ears.

I sat there with the beast. Uncomfortably at first, silently. Speaking was something that those who had been alive, and who had time to learn and practice speaking did. So I did not speak. He came then. Almost late, as he almost always was. He came and he sat in the only chair left, and it couldn’t have been farther away from me. He was yellow. Now I am aware that yellow is a color and that as such it probably brings about different perceptions in each of us who sees it, and even that some of you who are reading this may not have ever even seen the color, but that is the way he made me feel, and I will offer no more description.

Seeing him triggered something in me. A vision. A vision like the sooth-sayers of old, a vision of what was to be. And I had one eye open and one eye closed from that point on. Of course I said nothing about my vision, and sat silent next to the beast.