Crayon Heartbeats

I'm flying.

It's strange, how my wings burn and blather, talking to me of various meaningless things. My head is a metaphor, my surroundings are stories. Nothing makes any sense. Strange, detached thoughts encumber my mind, like a million kinds of sunbursts. I try to think, to acquiesce myself to reaching a point of firmness, some sort of centre of gravity to my tottering pole; and yet I fail miserably.
I open my eyes as the world spins, clustered within an array of bright colours, each one of them dense and dismally abundant in their nature. My brain is perceiving these thoughts I encounter, and it's searching for words to describe it. Yet the descriptions it forces my fingers to write make even less sense than what I see.

So I try to set the focus. I sort through everything, like the world is a huge file filled with manuscripts and documents with tattered edges and beautiful patterns. And what I see drives me to dizziness; it's an unalienable, undeniable reality.

The first thing I see is war.

If I started to define each war, my eyes would soon run dry, and my body would shrivel up like a prune. Crying may be called a weakness, but if one could only see the terrors of battle, they'd consider it a strength to live even after all the crying. There's a war in every country, and that makes 196 crayon heartbeats being scribbled away. There's a war within every person, striving to live in the depression that's seized the world like an unmanageable decay. And that means more than seven billion people who try to protect their hearts from being crushed like paper. Each day, each hour, each step that every person takes, every breath they breathe is like a dream. The world is like a giant kindergarden art-class masterpiece, filled with unreal waxy scribbles and false hopes. But the most alluring - and devastating - part of the picture is the crayon colours.

Especially the crayon heartbeats.

Pastel can't capture the same aura, because pastels always blend in too much. Watercolours aren't clear -they always get blurry at the edges and leave the paper looking like a crumpled up scarecrow. But crayons are perfect, because they describe reality in a scarily real way. It's ironic. The next time you see a crayon picture, look at it closely. It's very difficult to colour in the gaps with the waxy studs; it's very difficult to keep yourself from crossing the line. And you notice that the surface is always uneven, sort of rough. This is a heartbeat. Every granule speaks for itself. It's uncertain, where the crayon colouring started, and where it chose to end. Every second is uncertain, as is the systolic action of our heart. A crayon drawing never stays up on the board for long, and it's soon taken down. Life ends in much the same way. You don't pay attention to the small white spaces in your drawings, but they matter. Every heartbeat matters. Gradually, the crayon wears itself away, and you lose yourself, you lose purpose. There's nothing keeping you alive anymore.

My brain has dived under a cloud of haziness and I straighten my thoughts again. I turn myself from the disturbing crimson picture and focus on something new, shuffling among the stories of the world.

The next thing I see is laughter.

Whenever I think of laughter, my mind explodes in a medley of strident tornadoes and cackling faces with curly moustaches. I can see the faceless beings, their happiness rising in bubbles before them, and I can hear the caterwauling I would otherwise choose to ignore. But then again, I see the crayon heartbeats lurking behind everything and the sheer precipices of thought overwhelm me. I ravage the picture before me, inhaling in all the dreams and desires that the mere presence of happiness brings. And I realize, that while we could not live without laughter, it is an excess of that very drug that corrupts us. Caught in the ataxia that happiness pours upon us is when man makes his worst mistakes. It drives us until we are incapable of thinking, and yet... and yet...

It is happiness that helps us dream, and it is our dreams that define who we truly are.

So what would we be without happiness and laughter?

Where would we be without our crayon heartbeats to support us?

I zoom out of the picture, raising it at eye-level, peering at it closely until every squiggly line stands out. And I gasp, for what I see defines humanity in one go. It shows light and laughter, interspersed with colourful flecks of the horizon, embroidered with a chain of crayon heartbeats that knot everything together. They all fade in with one another, and yet stand apart in an amazingly stalwart fashion. I couldn't possibly unravel the heartbeats if I tried. They're part of the paper. And yet they fade and die. There are gaps in the chains, and I can't help but wonder how they got there. The world is God's picture, and only He can bring any changes to it. I see how the picture carries two polar ends, but the pain and the heartache intermingle with the happiness so that it's impossible to separate the two. This is the picture of the world, muddled up and beautiful. There's a cruel, sad beauty in the despair that strikes through our havens, and there's a poignant beauty in the life that runs through our veins. There's beauty in all the heartbeats as they agglutinate to complete the picture. We would be shells without them.

I finally realize that my mind has settled down, even though a part of it remains soaring. And I'm glad it decided to soar after all, because it helped me to see the beauty and pain I was oblivious to, caught in the entrapping of my worldly nature. There is beauty in everything. Everything is a different kind of beautiful.

You just have to zoom into the picture.