Do yourself a favor by Aaron White

Do yourself a favor

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and ignore your mother. Get up from your chair, your sofa. Leave your desk. Abandon your car. Get up, stand outside, and stare at the sun. Look it right in its incandescent eye. Stop just short of searing your corneas. Then cover your eyes and know, for the briefest moment, what it’s like to be unsighted. Amidst bright blindness your vision aches to readjust, to restore visual normalcy, to paint a plain picture of the world. Give it some time. Antiseptic white will soon fade. It will shed its stark guise, giving way to familiar shades of green: forest green, grass green, your grandmother’s shag carpet green—the green of Earth, of birth. Ancestral green. Objects soon regain their shape. You can now speculate colorblindness and the beauty of a world shaded emerald, jade. But soon, too soon, it turns cold. Your green goes gray. So, step into the bathroom. Find your bedroom. Adjust your rear view mirror and stare yourself down. See yourself glow with a monochrome corona. Trace your shape. It’ll soften, become a blissful, opiate blue, a blue that lulls. You’ll lose sense of yourself. You’ll feel fuzzy. You’ll loosen your existential grip and everything will bleed shades of devilish red. Solar retinopathy–your reflection under a darkroom lamp.  

Aaron White is an impassioned nerd and writer from southeastern Illinois. His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in Brain, Child Magazine; Mothers Always Write; 13th Dimension; Bluestem Magazine; Flash Fiction Magazine; The Commonline Journal; Heart Literary Journal; and others. His days are spent raising a toddler, navigating academia, trying to sell a novel, and wallowing in obscurity. Connect with him at amwhite90.tumblr.com and on Twitter @amwhite90.