This Plate That I’m Holding
And I had started to loosen up my finger muscles that held this fragile plate. I had been staring at the wall in front of me for the past three months. There were times when I was so close to throwing this empty, pathetically-designed plate right onto the wall. But the urge always faded away as soon as the glimpses crossed my temporary thoughts; glimpses of unspeakable little joys that I used to do back in my childhood days; and times where the world’s equilibrium had not gone biased towards the side of the lucky ones. I was on the unlucky side, up to the point where I did not believe in luck at all. Once you fell into the abyss of unluckiness countless times, you started to doubt the very concept of luck.
Why did I need to stare at this vertical plateau of a poorly-painted piece of this brick structure? I tried to unsee by rotating my neck in another direction, but I instantly got a muscle spasm, so great that the only thing to ease the pain was to continue staring into the void. The nothingness. The plate started shaking by itself. I let a particular amount of saliva drop into the plate’s contents, and I saw it perished into black dust like it always had been. Black dust that will fly around following the shape of my skull, and land on my chest, forever missing from this universe. Not just saliva; I had tried pouring down my sweet memories, bitter memories, full-time burdens, terrifying nightmares, pale love, and even my most profound elements of my being, they all ended in the same way; black restless dust that flew in unpredictable choreography.
I brought the plate to the front of my face, so my sight towards the wall got obstructed. I cannot clearly see the bottom of the plate. Its interior was the same color as its exterior, but its form was slightly weirder, It turned its geometrical spline each second, deviating its imaginary polygons, so it looked weird each time, similar to optical illusions I used to admire. A very small, barely audible voice could be heard. It sounded like a soft rumble of brown noises, with indescribable language that slowly changed into the similar sound of my full name. I felt shivers down my neck. Someone was calling me from that bottom-side of the plate. If I moved the plate to the left or right from the straight line of my eyes to the wall, the voice disappeared. I moved my holding hands back into their original positions. The voice disappeared forever.
My eyes locked onto a part of the wall, around the edge of the left region. It was identical to the right side, except that it felt less strained. The plate was on my lap, loosely held with both hands, and nothing had happened for the last three months. I could sense my phone suffocating from the flood of messages on the table behind me. An air fan that had reached its critical lifetime, spinning slower and slower, a pool of water in my bathroom, and numerous knocks on my door that I had ignored. I cannot stand this anymore. I decided to stand up for the very first time and a dark-green colored mouth suddenly appeared on the wall.
“You cannot do that and you already know the fact that destiny has chosen you to sit down and keep wandering around the in-between, in the grey area of this eternal limbo, dear mortal.” It spoke in a voice I can recall, but I did not have the exact adjective to describe it. I replied while widening my eyes and tightening my facial nerves.
“No, I know I’m the only person who can do whatever I want with my physical body, and not you. Whoever it is behind that wall, it’s a disguise, show yourself.”
“So you’re brave enough now to ask for consequences? You’ve changed quite a lot, but still,I don’t think you’re ready to see who I am.”
“I have never been this ready, and I have been holding this empty plate for what seems like forever, never filling it with anything. I have completed my mission, if there was any. Reveal it right now.”
The wall let out a very light chuckle before it crumbled itself, starting from its outer-most layer. The paint chipped itself starting from the top left corner, down to the bottom-right corner. Then the plaster wore off, followed by the remaining layer of the insulation. I gripped the plate stronger as I started to see the naked red bricks.
I let out a silent scream when a single brick fell into the ground, leaving a square-shaped hole in the middle. I bravely approached it, slowly rising from the chair; an old squeaky-chair that served no purpose other than to support my weakened bottom. I directed my left eye into the hold, and saw myself holding a plate, talking to a red wall in front of my second-me. The second-me stood up from the chair, and approached the wall. I got the biggest scare of my life, the realization that all of this non-sensical madness could have been an eternal loop that I could not break free from. I almost dropped the plate while I retreated from the wall hole. Instant weaknesses can be sensed in all of my legs. The plate fell to the cold ceramic tile floor, and rolled over the floor before it got stopped at the end-corner of the floor. I could see something coming out of it, but I could not move. Not even the smallest limb. I felt completely numb.
It was a heart-shaped sculpture, grey-colored, that rolled out of the mug. It looked similar to my heart. I knew it from the last time I cut out my chest with a disposable razor. So it was not always empty, the plate? I thought I had been holding my heart this whole time in the form of a plate, but it turned out it was something that acted as a container for my heart; my mere being, The content, my real heart, never showed up whenever I glanced at the inside of the plate. Why did I need to face such a frightening realization first before being able to see the physical form of the heart? The green mouth appeared again beside the wall hole, and it cried itself into a huge laughter.
“I knew it, you’ve never been ready, you’ve never been brave enough to realize that you’ve been chosen to be in this loop forever, and no, your heart doesn’t disappear, it’s there, inside of the plate, you’re just ignorant enough not to see it quite deeper.” It ended its sentence with a devil smirk.
I tried my best to ignore its preaching. While all of my limbs were frozen in place, and my immovable heart-shaped sculpture stood still on the floor, I was struck by the second realization that if this had all been a loop, I could then just redo the loop. Just after I finished the thought, the space and time around me glitched for a microsecond, and I could barely understand what had happened. It was like a very bright thunder slapped off everything around me, and when I had regained my vision, I was sitting again right in the same position I sat before the brick wall collapsed. I let a very heavy exhale of oxygen, scanning my surroundings, and ended the movement sequence by dropping my neck and my head into the plate on my lap.
It was the same plate that I held, but now there was my heart in it, beating slowly and steadily as its red-glowing color shone each time the artery fidged. I knew what would be behind that wall, and I already knew everything that I would face in the next months and years, but knowing that this small organ was already visible now gave me a very small momentary relief. This malicious loop was endless, but I owned this small heart; my very own life that I held with both hands.
