I live on a planet where no one can see. There are toxic vapors all around, clouding away all that you love. You can still love, and I try so hard to love, but it makes it so much harder to recognize anything, and even if you can, it looks so ugly under the gray and brown and musty sewage-green filter. I’ve had my mirrors covered for months, now, because I can no longer see myself in between the dirty haze and my reflection. Nobody can see each other, and especially not me.
I can only eat the first half of my sandwich. The second half is already coated in dust by the time I get to it and it no longer tastes good. The coarse particles scraping against my teeth when I chew is unsettling to me. Even my enamel is not safe here, and I don’t dare smile and expose myself further. Instead, I drink alcohol, one of the few flavors that can cut through the grime and make me taste again. It has a bad taste, but I don’t mind. I imagine it cleaving the dust particles’ bonds, dissolving the dirt, cleansing my body like sparkling fountains raining over flapping dove wings. I didn’t like the contents of my acidic stomach, anyway. The only water on this planet is in the mud.
There is a sanctuary in the sky, where the vapors are thinner, that I cannot reach. It is where the ads specified through data-infiltrating algorithms tell you to go if you want to breathe. They say they teach you how to breathe with wide-stanced exercises and brand name oxygen tanks decorated in rainbow stickers. But I can’t even see the sky, I don’t even know up from down in this filthy void of lightlessness, I wouldn’t even have the stamina to ascend the marble staircase with my wilting, tar-lined lungs coughing up carcinogens at every aching step. They use mud face masks to detoxify and enrich their skin with nutrients, but my mud comes from the pollution flocking to my tears when I cry of thirst.
The vapors are from a vantablack river, so poisonous to the touch it may as well be lava, that runs so deep into the planet’s crust that it leaks into the magma core. It is a constant sizzle that never seems to fizzle out. The crackling pierces through my desperate hands clamped over my ears, like the awful noise is coming from my own cochleas. I must deliver the antidote in the form of 15 mg canary yellow pills with a list of side effects longer than the list of my achievements.
Those that live higher than the sky complain of the chemicals and warn me that the pills must be temporary and call the sky blue. My sky is not blue. I will need these pills for the rest of my life. They do not know of the elements conspiring against me within my own body, that my sky will always be stained gray no matter what colored lens I frame my irritated eyes with. They can’t even see me beneath the layers of impurities, and I’m supposed to trust they know what color my sky is? I am glad they can not see me—I don’t want to see them.
But as the canary yellow plops into the vantablack, I fear that it is not the river that is poisonous or maybe the river was never leaking in the first place. There is clarity, most days, but that could be a trick of the light. I never did trust the Sun, maybe it was only a bright fluorescent lightbulb up there. I fear that I am condemned by a rotten core that wishes to collapse itself inwards and erase the native inhabitants as punishment for leeching too many resources, for daring to guess the color of the sky.
This planet might be expiring.