There are two things I know to be true:
One: I am alone inside Aperture.
Two: I am not alone inside Aperture.
I am alone because there are no people here, and therefore there is no one else to talk to, save my mind's projections that animate my cube, that is. (It's a great conversationalist.) Even if the cube's voice wasn't a hallucination and it was a simple companion cube, I would still talk to it. I need something to fill the airwaves besides the merciless march of machinery. Something to remind me I exist. That I am here.
Alive.
Defiant.
Defiantly alive.
Yet I am not alone because she is here. Not with me right now, of course. If that were the case I'd be dead. Luckily, the places I inhabit are places beyond her reach. These locations are few and far between and I guard them fiercely, because her reach is like a flood across a plain—sweeping and seeping—and I can never allow myself to forget that.
She knows that I am out here.
I know that she is out there.
She is weaved so intricately into the scaffolding of Aperture that I fear for every step I take, knowing that each footstep risks a ping to her systems that could ring loud enough to blind me. To survive, I must remain a ghost in her machine—a phantom bit of code that she can never trace into.
I cannot exist.
So, I do not exist.
And if I do not exist, then she is alone, too.
We are both alone. We are both here together. These diametric statements are mutually exclusive, and yet I hold the truth of them in my hand like a magnet. Positive. Negative. All part of the same closed loop.
A loop that neither of us can escape.
I struggle to mentally untangle the ways in which I am entangled with Aperture. This, more often than not, manifests in the paintings I scatter across my sanctuaries like some sort of horrible sneeze—a virus that can't be eradicated.
I use these paintings to record what is true. Not necessarily what is accurate in a factual sense—that part doesn't matter. It never matters. The brain is not a camera—it doesn't care about the truth.
That's the funny thing about truth: it's subjective.
Our stories can be molded and edited and reshaped to suit our needs. Much in the way the neuroplastic brain restructures itself, we rearrange the truth until it becomes something we can handle. A distinct narrative. Because that is what we are, after all— one strange story from beginning to end.
I paint to create a rock-solid reference of reality. My brain, try as it does, cannot inject fabricated fears and doubts and events and memories if I have those stories painted in front of me. My brain cannot play with memory like a set of building blocks—removing and stacking and crashing and throwing—if I lock those blocks behind the glass case of a painting.
That is why I paint: not to know the truth, but to take my malleable memory and solidify it into something as solid as concrete.
But, like concrete, paint takes a long time to dry.
Even on the bone-dry panels, it takes tens of thousands of seconds for one coat of one color to dry, and it must dry before I layer on another. And I do layer. I must layer— because truth is not monochrome. It breaks the light of reality like a prism, splitting it into infinite facets of infinite colors. It takes time to capture even a fraction of that projection, but I have nothing if not time.
I can't ignore the possibility of my memories becoming corrupted before I can translate them into art. It happens. It always happens. That is why I started painting in the first place. My murals anchor me in the storm of schizophrenia, giving me a chain to grip when the maelstrom shrieks around me. But, in order to ensure that I paint the correct truth, I do my best to wait for a good day before finalizing any mural designs.
Even on the bad days, though, sketching out ideas allows me to record the reality of that moment—all that I think and all that I feel and all that I believe on that day. On a good day, I can recognize some of those past moments to be factually false, but what I felt was true to me in that moment, and I can still use that alternate reality to fuel my creativity.
Once I confirm my plans, I move into painting, and this does not depend on good days or bad days. My designs act as a blueprint for me to follow, a color-by-number that even I can't mess up. It takes time, yes, but all good things take time.
And, until I am alone no longer, I have nothing but time.
A/N: Woke up one morning and wrote the rough draft of this in my notebook all in one go. Not sure where it came from, especially since I never write in first person. The spirit of Doug possessed me.