Chemicals

Quiti sang: "There are clouds, yonder, where my grandmother lives. Apple trees and orchards, they form a reddish cloud together. Blue storms and fire, a green one. High above the telephone poles, the sky rang. Then an emptiness came over me like a raincloud. Something fell, and I began to smell chemicals all around me. The chemicals seemed to be all around me. They swallowed and embraced me. They were my only friends, my jewels. They never came to see me; they always ambushed me. When I tried to hunt them down, they scattered back into their boxes on the Periodic Table. They were too small for me to see, and yet I was small enough for them. They tried to choke me at the same time as they nourished me, half-reluctantly, almost by accident. They said to me, 'You are just a bag of chemicals.' I couldn't say anything. I was too sleepy and dumb to say anything, and knew that the chemicals in my brain were inducing the sleepiness and my own stupidity.... I will not be defeated, I decided, but the hills, the verdant hills, all around sang to the chemicals, and the shifting sunlight seemed to nod in proud agreement, more often so than in disagreement. The sky was now a bright pink. 'Was it a sunset?' I asked. 'Maybe,' Drew answered. 'Perhaps my eyesight has deteriorated?' I asked again. This time, a goldfish answered, 'Perhaps, perhaps not.' Then I asked, 'Is the world coming to an end?' With no pause in between, I said, 'Decidedly not.' I then asked, 'Am I really just a bag of chemicals?' I had to answer this question myself. 'No, no!,' I said, hurriedly. 'I am not a bag of chemicals. Instead, I am a chemical of bags, or better yet, an alchemy of bags. Full of bags, I fly around like a chemical, sometimes sit underground for many years like a chemical, and jump, consume, and am consumed like a chemical, all very clumsily because of the weight of all the bags I carry, and because the alchemical processes in my heart slow me down, for better or for worse.' I may be a ghost. Or a monster."

One breath, two breaths. A breath-ful of chemicals is what tells a story and sings many a song in the evening air.