rembrandt-von-hel-blog

[rembrandt-von-hel-blog]

@joshgroban: Many challenges accepted! @Lin_Manuel requested Burn! I challenge @thatgracemclean & @brittainashford! #HamForAll  http://prizeo.com/hamilton

[rembrandt-von-hel-blog]

My Window is an Easel

    It was a cold day, as cold as it had ever been. The wind burned my nostrils with a cold, striking scent. I felt tiredness set as my vision swam as if I had droopy puddles for eyes. I looked upon row after row of monotonous beige after monotonous beige, until I spied one especially familiar to me. As I entered, the creaking of doors and silvery-metallic tintinnabulation announcing my arrival, no fanfare availed itself to me. Setting aside my bindle of burdens, I mounted step after step until my steps had brought me refuge in the form of a sullen lump of charred-wool and sheeting.  As I lay upon my mound, haggard and hard-hearted, I startle at a sudden sensation of warmth. My legs swing over my cold and coarse bed and my feet feel the chilling stark white ceramic floor. As I rise, my bones creak and rasp and groan a horrid crack, and I smell the dust and musk of dirt and mire, but then, as if epiphany, I see it.

    My window is an easel; a painting to a beautiful realm beyond this world of whites and greys. I stood there in wonder, standing in some squalid slum, wondering wondrously at my mural of scarlet bleeding-blue. Its centerpiece: a titian hyssop so bright and beautiful that it brought me to tears. Surrounding, a halo of carnations so sensually present I could taste its rosy texture, framed by hyacinths ever so blue and ever so clear. Twas a tableau framed and mounted upon my wall of greys and stark white; a portal to an otherworld beyond my drab own. As I stumbled closer yonder, the gentle wind embraced me, beads of warmth embedded within the zephyr, as if a lover’s caress. It brought a warm and earthy scent that swelled my chest with heat so sweet, it turned my tongue to ecstasy. Ah. I covet this feeling, the ambassador of this world of clear clouds and warm winds and soft hues.

    In my embrace, my neck craned upwards and my eyes were availed of a colony of clouds drifting lazily in the breeze, so soft and so smooth just beyond my reach. The lilting croon of bashful veeries enveloped my hearing with the most pleasant calls. My gaze turns downward, and I’m met with the gentle swaying of trees, their earthy pine fragrance lingering in the breeze, and the joyful prance of children’s play. All of it, all of it, under a nimbus-framed hyssop ebbing down to Gaia’s embrace, my senses enveloped in this brave new world.

    But it all goes cold. Strikingly, my warmth weakens. Dark clouds approach, at first cirrus and straight and narrow, as if black fingers grasping for the Sun. Digits once soft and gentle, now coarse and jagged. Its palm encroaches, stealing away my canvas of scarlet bleeding-blue. As the reticent rusted veery halts its lilting tunes, my tiffany tones are enveloped by grey overcast. The gentle wind mutates into a cold and pernicious gale; the Tempest starts, my revel ended. My titian hyssop with its nimbus of carnations are swept away and my painting, now devoid of sound, of light, of texture, is now dead. Grey engulfs me once again, my canvas a phantasm of grisaille portraiture. As swiftly as it arrived, it is gone; my portal closed, my mural ripped. All my world is grey; my distant realm of light and color, now beyond my grasp, is forever gone.

[rembrandt-von-hel-blog]

Hi, my name is...

Welp, I’ve not been here for a while, nor have I really done much worth merit, so let’s start now.

Hi, my name is the first few words I say that you probably won’t bother to remember.

My favorite color is nil, because I simply lack the personality to be anything more dynamic than none of them.

I’m not so pessimistic in person, honest, it’s simply that this medium we call the “web” (or at least I do) places me in a sort of ennui, as I realize that though I am popular (relatively), I am also rather lonely.

A common trope espoused by the generations older and, self-purportedly, wiser among the human population is that online, we have many friends and yet no friends.

And yet still knowing this conceit, I’ll have neither the desire nor take the initiative to correct this loneliness, too addicted to this medium to ever let it go; ensnared.

Perhaps this is why they call it the “web.”

Where do I come from? Hmm, who knows?

Such a question feels like a euphemism for “where were you raised?” or “where do you place your loyalty?” 

In truth, I was never truly raised anywhere.

As if a dandelion in the breeze, I am whisked to and fro to nations new and never before begot, at least to a child.

Born in my native XXXX, and visiting - never truly living - in other countries, my “home” has always simply been the last room I’ve confined myself to.  

Which doesn’t portend well to a normal childhood, with friends and the like.

No matter. I found friendship elsewhere.

Within the worlds of fiction and literature, I found many friends. Strong friends, smart friends. People to whom - though fictional - embody attributes that I would come to aspire as a youth. 

Willful and brave Arthur; daring and noble Lancelot; wise and clever Merlin; these were my first best friends, a list that would span stories, genres, universes - even space and time itself.

More and more, I grew invested in these characters, and even greater did my dependency on their worlds increase. 

Their homes are where I was truly raised. Their homes are to where I owe my truest loyalty.

Again, I promise I’m not such a wet rag all the damn time, it’s simply the current mood I’ve found myself in.

And just as in real life, one cannot truly help the mood in which one makes an introduction.

So properly, now, while the renaissance of youthful memory dithers between melancholy and joy,

Hi, my name is...