Okay, so quarantine is now what we could call distant past, in Covid-19 timeframes. We’ve all been out and about for quite some time now, infecting each other, or not. Some of us are getting infected. Some of us are getting infected again. Every cough and sniffle leads to dark thoughts.

But that’s not the point at all. The point is Kay Sage, this surrealist painter I’ve come upon only recently. I’m stunned that someone got into my head and planted seeds, some before I was born and is still haunting my life. Yes, I’ve had dreams that looked just like this. It’s frightening now, years later because I am not young, and see nightmares of my childhood have taken form. Or at least that someone else has seen them as well. It leads me to believe that maybe these are real places. They exist. People have been there. I have been there, at least in dreams, and I’m hoping they don’t foreshadow my future.

I have been in this exact place, wherever it is.

I was speaking yesterday, by the way, of the headaches that have afflicted me for as long as I can remember. The very first, I only recently remembered, was triggered by a drop of icy water dripping from the eaves of a house near where I grew up. It landed at a place on my head and it was as if my entire existence burst in an explosion of white light and shards of broken glass. It was the most excruciating pain I’d felt, up to that point. I’ve since felt it a thousand times or more. It’s always the white light explosion and the feeling of tearing, and then the hammer blows. My whole life…

My entire life.

But it’s the sense of weight that comes with it. It’s the sense of gravity that can persist for days after an episode. It’s the weight and the hopelessness. Depression? Maybe. The word defeat may fit better in this case. Defeat more than depression or despair. Exile maybe even more than defeat. Exile to these strange realms and shades of sickly gray-green. Nausea. Emotional nausea, if you can imagine that as a thing. The feeling of horror that you have a feeling just that ugly inside you. Does that make sense? It’s the dread fear that should you look in the mirror you will see something too horrible to look at. Not a monster, but just something vile and stomach-turning.

How does one live with colors this vile inside their head? I’m assuming that this didn’t feel good for Kay Sage. I could be wrong. She could have been as cheerful as a summer lark. I’ve read nothing about her so maybe she tripped through life laughing a gay laugh and was a source of light and love for everyone around her.

I’m guessing that’s not the case though, because she has seen this place, and some things, try as you may, cannot be unseen. I can’t unsee these places and my worst fear is that ideas like eternity and damnation are real and that this is what it will be. This and the gravity business. The weight.

The weight.