Alonzo Rangel, Senior, Writing, Fort Worth, TX
When you’re the history, it’s the droves that remain idle. The rounds you make through pointillist renderings of motion, so swift, the galactic fabric that you were commissioned is now a wind coarsened wisp. In your sheer dress, you walk the gallery to find that it’s all as you left it, with some frames empty and others layered like a dartboard with growth rings. However, this being your last stroll through the exhibit before you walk bare and lose your vision to truths masked in torn and stolen linens, the points align. Not to show you once more the confines of events in the flesh, but to retire you in satisfaction knowing that this moment is what reality truly was at its thick, amorphous conception. What’s been mundane for eons now dazzles with the terror of squeezing together an image fit for a final viewing.
For once, you are the beholder of piecemeal grace rather than the keeper of motel mosaics. For once, you reach out. Just enough to graze, just enough to hint at the texture of a timeline ablaze.
And there you are. Pastel patterns of pink and brown no longer wane under the strain of consistency at rapid pace. The flow of creation and arrangement for maximum impact keeps your hands in gleeful disarray. What is now a museum was once a studio, and here you sit with your products in their first state. For a bit, you’re compelled to craft a world that will not dispose of you when artificiality is introduced as being more than a practice. And a few sketches are indeed drafted wherein you retain the title of commander for all your days. But all the fancy you found in returning to more constructive times halts when the room is taken in with your fully intent gaze. Every monument and the moments leading to their dedication and deterioration are there for you to solidify. Just decide it is so, and so it will stay.
You pull back and wretch in disgust. There may have been more time allotted for the walkthrough, but you end early. Naked, hobbled by self-disdain, mocked by the pieces that dance menacingly as your eyes no longer strain to look at what remains. The walk starts over, with nothing to guide you but memory and the bitterness of an ended reign.
It is comforting, though, having nothing else to see. When you’re the history, you’re the founder of what’s come to destroy you.
The points no longer have authority.