unmasking the seasons

Have you seen us? Everyone is blistered and scarred, mummified in physical shapes of their lives; some people wear their purple scars proudly, smiling their pink-chapped lips at passersby. The others change with the seasons, shedding face after face for another plastic mask. One can walk through them and find that their masks are as ugly as their scars, grotesque and twisted into inhuman shapes and primitive curves. But in their world, these curves are normal. Rather than repairing the scars, the jagged purple slashes of burdens they’ve left on others (and themselves), they freely create more. After all, they don’t deny who they are. They refuse to accept it. All identical, they have formed a society based on equality, where there are no thoughts left unsaid because there are no thoughts and where there is equality because everyone is treated with the same malevolent indecency.

In theory, they have the perfect society. What of low self esteem, controversy, and discrimination? All are no more; the elimination of diversity ended those problems long ago. After all, the self is gone, and there is nothing left with which to compare. They have achieved the union of their brothers and sisters that so many dreamt of. Those dreamers of the past never thought that such a brotherhood could come at the expense of the mind, heart, and soul; now those dreamers are dead, turning under decayed cement graves and forgotten epithets. Those dreamers forgot that most of their race found hatred easier to accept than love. There’s always reason to hate (no matter how warped it may be), but what of love? “Now love,” they say, “that is irrational.”

Now I watch those purple-scarred, physically deformed humans walking the streets at twilight. When that blue moon comes around again, I walk with them down the wet, blue-silver streets. The color of the sky matches the marks on our skin, but each day our scars fade a little, shrink a little with each beat in time’s rhythm. When the sky reaches its swaying limbo between night and day, sometimes it seems as if the swirling effervescence of the wilting sunlight engulfs us, basking our senses in neon blacklight, blinding our eyes with purple lightning. In those moments all scars are gone, our skin is as spotless as our souls, and we see ourselves at the day of birth, fiery, new, and unstoppable. Sometimes there are people buying plastic replicas of beauty on the sidewalks beside us, replicas that should have been more than plastic, replicas that should have been, that could have been, their own faces. They could have owned those contoured lips and flashing green eyes.

But those contours and those flashes came from thought and emotion that have become obsolete in the face of life (or living death, I suppose). The body has deteriorated along with the soul (which went with the mind), and now all we have left is our scarred skin. Even as they buy these masks, this new skin to cover their scars, they forget the indelible purple marks inscribed on their souls. They forget that they can cover their faces, but their souls are always naked to the world. But each time we walk, more people fall in step beside us, less mask vendors mark the sidewalks, and we get a little closer to defeating the loop of the seasons.