Importance of Interiority

Her entire life was confined to one red room. A deep saturated red that reflected the bends of rivers and the peaks of water rushing and spoke, at the same time without contradiction, of the acts of living and dying.

Adeline spent her days in the red room arranging fruit on platters. She tried to design a perfect mixture of greens and apples, oranges and lemon.

Her red room had a window where, outside, the earth was green and slipped into blue at the horizon. She looked outside and had a different feeling of living than when she looked at her red walls. Outside was a stagnant peacefulness, a quality of serenity and a world of motion in process but unmoving.

Adeline went to the window and drank in the green, and the pinpoints of blue and yellow flowers, and the sky that seemed to her like a vast pool of water without a bottom and miraculously suspended in the air, hovering above everything as if stayed by some invisible hand or a stretched piece of plastic wrap. She did this when the movement of the room overwhelmed her, made her seasick nauseous so that all she could do was turn away from the lemons and oranges and apples on the table, turn away from tidal wave of red that crept up and over her and waved to and fro like a king cobra seducing its victim.

The trees outside, compiled of tiny white blossoms on the edge of blowing off and littering the air and the ground, seemed to her anchors she could latch onto. With the study of the trees came the end of one sense of movement and the beginning of another. Something much slow and closer to the true meaning of time.

Adeline could feel the contrast between her interior and exterior and sometimes, she wished she could know life as a tree. A pear tree with a termite eaten trunk that became black when it rained and hovered at dark brown the rest of the time. A pear tree in spring, just before the small clustered buds of life sprouted and the tree looked twisted and crusted with too many years of living. When it was just a dark brown thing contrasting against the blue sky or, when it rained, a place for darkness to gather and rain to collect at the undersides of the branches until they fell to the ground from the weight.

And after the new leaves, bright green to show their age, extruded from the mysterious capsules that arose like blemishes, the green and black and grey played together beautifully and gave Adeline that sense of something greater than herself.

She loved the fruit that came later. Sometimes she had pear dreams and woke up tasting the tart sweetness and grit of the pear fruit that was months off from being.

But then, after long periods of looking at the trees, she could feel her body growing heavier and closer to the ground. It frightened her to seek the movement of the red, which didn't seem so frantic now. A steady pace.

The red room had twisting vines of blue and blue buckets of blue flowers sinking into the walls like veins and the blue and red played together. One that was living and flowing and the other that was living and flowing, spilling, as it were, onto everything and covering it sticky.