The Velvet Wild

Nicole Sitkin

The baritone is rising. Stiff and commanding, it’s somehow slick as well. Persuasive, strong, but without being brute. It almost tastes like squash. The fall kind, that’s full and rich and more filling once eaten then it first seems.

A yellow squash, that’s what this recording is. I’m happy to have pegged the flavor. I look, and I feel, and I hear and I see, sometimes all at once in a jumbled mess, and I peg what’s going on. The doctors shake their heads; they say its synasthesia and nonsense and some aphasia. They just don’t understand spouts. But other people, people not chained to white coats and stiff necked judgments, know what I’m talking about. They feel the flow under my words, the river of meaning that’s within the words, about the words, more important than the words. I feel and I peg, and other people feel, and find the answer in my pegs to what they feel.

My name is Rodin, and I am an artist of experience. I live in a mental hospital. I don’t hate it here; I don’t love it here. It’s just a here to be in. They feed me—watery and diluted, it’s the taste of plastic rich in my mouth—and I have a bed—snug and warm, with a duck comforter. It’s a comforter for a child, but it comforts, and they call me “childlike in functionality” so this comforting comforter fits.

Things are better if they fit. Crayons and paper don’t fit—two different things, too much difference in that split. Spiraling color and harsh blinding, they do not fit at all.
I try to fit my words to my music. It is a different music. It is not jazz, reggae or rock. No hip hop or folk in my head. It is the music of my heart, and I feel it. I try tossing it around aloud, but the dirty eyes look and stare and blink too owlishly. Like a bird at night, they swivel all around, all around, seeing too much of me. The little mouse, open, open to the sky, running ,running, hiding in the rye. So I hum instead. It fills my chest, and I do not know how to be a person who does not feel the music of their person and fill up with it to the brim.

There is a girl. She is beautiful, but not in a pretty way. She is economy of motion—no effort wasted. Yet she moves like molasses. She is a surging molasses monster, rising from the deep to accomplish its task. She talks, but there are no words. There is only crying. Silent tears falling out of her mouth whenever it opens. A koi fish in an airless pond, the bubbles of pearl fall out of her mouth and sink away, leaving her surrounded by empty black.
They do not see. They call her delusional, because she sees the world for what it could be. She is a dreamer. I am a dreamer. I like dreamers. But they do not see the dreams; they only see nightmare. ”Catatonic”, “Emotional affect” are her words. She could keep them in a little purse and offer them up to the determiners, but they always have their own, ready to go. They do not need the ones she has adopted into herself.

The clouds are beautiful today. Puffy and fluffy and round. They are blown by the wind. It must be a strong wind. The tree is bending, touching its toes. If a tree had toes, they’d be the longest toes in the world, reaching deep deep into the earth, crumbling the dirt between and searching for a solid fit. Blumfeld is in the field.

He does not have affect or aphasia. He is the golden boy, shining with improvement. He is Seroquel, Lamictal and Zoloft, twice a day, on the dot. They see his nods and agreements, and admire their reflection. Not seeing the snarling snakes seething right behind. He shoves in line and steals applesauce , and mocks my spouts. He is like a doctor, and does not appreciate spouts. He reflects their lack of openness.

Worst of all, he plays with the molasses monster like she is a bendy toy. He pulls her back and forth, wrenching her until she cannot move anymore, and breaks into little itty bitty pieces of gasps and quivers. I hate him. He is worse than the doctors. They are more powerful, the power of a pen and a diagnosis waiting on their fingers, trying to fit us into their cubicles of definition. But they only don’t understand. They are missionaries in a foreign land trying to lead some disjointed band to the beaches, to the sand.To the parting of the waters and on to the promised land. But the band only sees waves and fish and shells, and the doctors do not understand how they are missing the water, and do not realize that they are seeing, but seeing different.

He is worse. He sees us, he is one of us, but he is renegade. He creeps in the forest, wishing to be a tiger. Pouncing on his prey in a blur of orange and white and black. He finds our points of connection, the points that anchor us to their world and make us able to connect, to explain our interior to their exterior, and he bites. Hard and deep.

I am not wounded. I have my spouts to protect me. An armor of words, a sword of exclamations, and a shield of declamations. But I am not careless. I am a lion, not a lamb. I lie with lambs and eat with lambs, and am sad to see them become lost with no Mary to reassure them and lead them and leave them to their own pretty pasture.

There is a new girl. She is a doctor, but she has something else. There is a surge within her—golden bugles blaring . Happy and joyful, ringing out a tide of well wishing. But I have also heard it be the smell of baking bread, jostling against the air. Warm and soft and waiting to be used by whoever needs it.

I like the new girl. She calls us their names, but she does not expect us to be their names. The containers become nothing but a code, not a definition of who we are and who we can be. She colors with the molasses monster, and finds music for me to listen to, and even tells the tiger to please behave, and leave them to their own devices. It’s not for him to say or judge.

She is a sun to my fellow sunflowers. They turn to her, raising their necks shyly. Yellow, gold, and even blue, their colors start to shine and pulse again. The other doctors say she is good with words, has a knack for dealing with patients. They do not see that they too could be cosmic and beautiful. I like cosmic and beautiful—it makes us sparkling stars as well, exploring the velvet wild of the universe, each in his own way.