Something Pure and Innocent
But, just like a fool, I went and followed all the lights to the sparks
Gabriel Royal - Remember Us
The ceiling of the cold hospital room is empty. Definitely, Carlos appreciates it.
He needs a wide sheet of paper just like that, free from words and white noise, to project his thoughts on; it will do, even with the dust and the faint glow of the spider webs. As long as it's lonely, and silent, everything is fine to him.
On the other hand, he is not yet sure what to do with the tangle his emotions finds themselves in right now. He sees nothing to cling to, neither a beginning nor an end. He decides to take care of that later.
Many are the thoughts that come in waves, regular and fresh, with the rare breeze from the window — he watches the fragments of his memories peacefully, caught in a sweet confusion, a something of voices and words that needs no explanation.
It all comes together, to rebuild his ideas; it shows him this town through a new pair of eyes, turning it into anything that is natural, beautiful, and timeless. And it is so hard to believe, in the quiet pain of today, how many things felt foreign at first.
There had been a time in which everything of this place was plain unbelievable. Then the transition had come, the fuzzy moments he had taken to get used to it all.
And then he had met that long phase, the one he was living through — the phase in which Night Vale had begun to cling to his clothes and his skin, had slowly started belonging to him.
Maybe — just maybe — the truth was also the other way round.
It had been, probably, the day of his second haircut. The barber's terrified look as he slammed the door, with hurried apologies in who knows what tongue, was just the last addition to a row of events that were — he wouldn't know how else to put it — definitely weirder than usual.
It had joined the weird looks, the weird laughter, and that one barely hidden tone in the voice of whomever he met. He knew each of those moments, gone in the blink of an eye against the Night Vale sky, was the sign of something greater; he felt the aura that was being born around him, the universe of his touch, of his first footprints on the face of the town.
It still was awkward, and out of proportion. He could never figure it out, until the day in which a merciful soul had finally told him — and he, in silence, had done nothing but listen, with disbelief written all over his eyes.
From that day on, Carlos had never stopped listening to the radio. He had gone with the flow of his voice, obsessively looking, as his nature told him to do. He kept searching that maze of words, over and over, in the hollow spaces left in between his work; and then, until the sun fell pray to the evening, he let the sound of Cecil's sentences roll from start to finish, obsessively looking for the one thing he actually knew how to read — a meaning.
But he had soon discovered how, with each time giving the illusion to pass, his struggles seemed to lose their purpose. The way Cecil talked to him, about anything and more, grew less and less readable, destroying his feeble convinctions one by one.
In just a few weeks, Carlos had found himself unarmed. He had forgotten all about his old idea — that, more or less, reason could answer all questions of life was probably the greatest lie he had ever been told.
Then he had been able to see beyond his barriers, and started to wonder with a little less fear. Whatever research Cecil asked him about, from the mysteries of time to the actual nature of imaginary corn, became unimportant and pale in front of the unsolved questions his very being inspired; and at whatever time, for reasons unknown to him, Carlos begun feeling the dazzling light hidden in his voice.
It was just fascinating, the way he could build and tear apart his whole town with a simple inflexion — the speed and the measure of his words seemed to control universes, artful and calibrated as the brushstrokes of a master. And the nature of his voice echoed in all of him; in the adoring glances, even in those ridiculous gestures that always made him smile, Carlos found the resonance of the origin of all things.
He was a puzzle — a very interesting one to boot. Carlos studied him closely, in and out the flow of the broadcasting days. And he found that this man, who was nothing to him — and had become something, and could as well be, an unknown voice whispered in him, everything — was one he would never be able to decode, one that couldn't be enclosed in a plain meaning.
It had taken him surprisingly long to understand that, in fact, there didn't have to be any.
The radio lies still on the bedside. He doesn't have the heart to turn it on tonight — long minutes of static, randomly interrupted by screams from time to time, is not what he wants to bear with before, finally, getting to his voice.
Carlos lets the silence speak for him, and waits. He has two thoughts, two truths, swirling in his head; he needs a little more time for them to sink in.
His hearts vibrates at the slightest touch of the first — the idea that he lives, here and now, after risking everything for a place where he doesn't belong. Not yet, at least for now; and his foreign breath rises anyway, thanks to a miracle, in the amazed air of the night.
He cannot ignore the second, either — the one that keeps coming back, with a hint of fear and surprise. In spite of its fuzziness, Carlos is fully aware of that wondrous small fact.
And he discovers, over and over again, that if he had died there — and his heart shivers, again — if he had actually died in there, stranger in yet another stranger land, his very last thought would have been him.
With a pensive sigh, Carlos finds the energy to sit.
The dark blot just by the radio, on the bedside, is his phone. So scary, so easy to reach.
Enclosed in that plastic box is the border between what he knows he can handle, and what is completely new; the perspective to move on, so unknown and terrifying, is a path he feels he wants to take.
For the first time, he finds no harm in trying. After all, this is life; and it is fleeting, and a miracle that can be saved, as majestic and unpredictable as the lights written in the universe.
Taking a deep breath, Carlos selects Cecil's number, and starts typing.