freak think
by Daniella Caycedo
image source unknown
(1) trust is a palace, with stained glass windows and spiral stairs promising great heights to take you to. its like the grassy plot next to the baseball field a few blocks north of here, meaning: its easy to forget about, but when you remember it exists and its there and hasn’t moved since the early days, you run to it and it greets you back with its solidity— true unmovingness. with great speed, you hover over the asphalt that holds its multitudes to take in its entire dimension, *homebound runnin* and stacking little dirt patches along with you. gravity gives it a recognizable form but it can also travel as a *mist* and into the nostrils you gulp with for sustenance. one day, i decided to visit the palace and i drank several gallons from its waterfalls of liquified mercury water. no one believed me when i came home with bliss in my eyes and said that i had just died and been reborn as a fish. when the bliss subsided and i went for a walk. i found a story, hidden under a rock, on a gravel path. Little colonies of beetles and dirt-biters formed a halo around it. i took my time dusting it off with the skeleton of a leaf. by the time i was three quarters of the way through, the leaf had frozen and the halo of insects had been replaced with wet patches of earth. without realizing it, i would fall asleep every night and wake up every morning, between paragraphs and chapters and so forth and so on and on and on. i was so enthralled by the narrative, so convinced by the characters, that material realities became obsolete. then something happened ! …..there was a blast of light, and everything came to fruition! i saw something… an unforgivably beautiful shadow on the train, but i was actually in my room, not a train, and it wasn’t through *vision* that i saw the shadow …. but…as a *wish*. it must have come from a continuous sound that penetrated every corner of the room, and… that i eventually realized was a sound i emitted. and then…. the devil— slithered his name through my teeth. but i welcomed it and saw myself in it, and we both cried for help. he told me all about how he was once an angel. and i said, “i was also once an angel.” he told me about his midwest origins, and gave away a *bespoke* sense of humor by explaining the methodology of how he chooses how to torture each soul. in his defense, he gives a fair warning to each victim. in this room, i also heard… a dull thumping rhythm. i asked him,”if ‘devil’ and ‘angel’ are the binary, what would the defiant shade of gray be?” and he said, “it is an entity so formless that humans cannot register it with their mortal senses”. He later willingly, and almost arrogantly, confessed to me that he travels through the human emotion network. through its tunnels and aqueducts. i explained to him that— every feeling is a micro-dream, and sometimes, well, probably most of the time, you can’t realllyyyy remember it, so then you’re putting the jaggedy fragments together, and this jarrring chaotic process gives one a sense of power…or kind of a warped autonomy the devil responded, “yesterday was the lunar eclipse. infinite light years alive and the moon is now realllllyyy starting to become more familiar with the reality that.. it does not actually know what is *best* for human beings, and actually it is truly none of its business what someone’s path and destiny and fate and biology will lead them to, and…. because nothing is certain/guaranteed/ promised, //….the most painless route for it to take is one of subtle* neutrality*. …a pure form of ecstasy! worthy of envy and admiration. i rolled my eyes at this. he continues, “the moon is actually 4.5 billions years old to be precise. i hadn’t been born yet, but if i had, my character arc would’ve probably gone in an inverse trajectory. the moon is thus complicit in the manifestation of my agenda.” (2) as a teenager i spent a lot of time in the bathtub. i remembered this, and am now remembering watching a baby play and take pause and look so at home in a warm bath. i remember the woman with a dark bob telling another woman very flippantly to stop being a child. the “bathtub experience” is a phenomenon that has origins in deepdeep, pre fiber-optics, post-wormholes, first discovered by 16th century wartime housewives across the globe. the baths started to become…more of a clinical event as time went on. gloves, clipboards, syringes. vials, and pipettes were thrown into the mix. “make it funny baby, make it fun-nyyyy” the nurses would say to each other outside the bathroom door. the nurses would wear very tight and very small shorts, with a cropped form-fitting scrub top. while i bathed, they would touch each other and play doctor. the louder it got, the smaller my shoulders got and the hotter the bath water became. i dreamt that i suddenly became very ill, and that they would bust through the door and make me sweat. and then i would be escorted by these fallen angels out into the desert-scape, but my thirst would be quenched so there was no real existential threat. we would sustain each other with spit and story making. and the sun would roll its eyes at the lawlessness of it all. the bath water always gets cold, and it got cold this time like every other time before it, and i exit the tub and the nurses exist somewhere that’s not here.
Daniella Caycedo has no middle name, lives in Richmond, Virginia and has big dreams. She’s been writing and making visual art in a consistent manner since she was 14. She loves and actively seeks to collaborate with different artists as much as possible. Please reach out to her via email at dcayced@gmail.com, or through instagram at una_vela_de_canela for any inquiries or opportunities to connect!