Thiara Curie

                                  
 

Last night, I dreamed I was in a laboratory and had discovered something different.

It was something colorful and bright, so everyone began to think it was radioactive. I had touched various places, people, and equipment, so everything was marked by this mysterious substance, and suddenly everything had to be isolated.

The people who had been touched wanted to go to the hospital, but when they called or even got there to report what had happened, no one wanted to attend to or touch them. Everyone began to spiral into a kind of collapse over something they didn’t even know what it was, and the whole situation turned into chaos.

No one wanted to go back to that place, which now seemed to them like a cursed location with the imminent possibility of contamination. So, everyone saw me as the one who brought chaos or as someone who posed a risk. In the end, even I blamed myself. I felt dirty because of this substance, even though no explosion or immediate reaction had occurred or been detected and even though no one, including myself—the one considered the greatest potential contaminant or disseminator—showed any symptoms or discomfort other than those brought about by the chaos they themselves had created around this new discovery.

The white room and clothes were stained with colorful, glowing marks from the substance. No one thought it could be something good; they simply associated anything touched by me, now considered impure, as something they should avoid.

In the end, I felt bad for having brought to light something that until then had been hidden. I remembered my white lab coat and its colorful stains, and they were so beautiful—they truly existed! I saw something no one else could. And yet, no matter how much people crave truth, knowledge, and the new, they are never truly ready for it.

Faced with something they’ve never seen before, it doesn’t matter if it’s beautiful, if it shines—none of that could be seen or interpreted as something good.

I thought, well, this has happened before, so maybe they have a reason to create chaos. They associated a new discovery with something bad because, in the past, something that was also beautiful and bright was not what they thought it to be.

I cannot judge them, but if fear and chaos must arise in the face of anything resembling the past, well, then we must content ourselves with what we already know, disregard the new, and settle into the comfort of everyday discomfort, instinctively never truly feeling satisfied with the old.

If truth is a pair of glasses for those who cannot see it, perhaps they simply don’t need or want to wear glasses.

Perhaps wearing glasses makes them see beyond what they can or should. Maybe it’s too painful to see the wounds that are still open, which they themselves had to sew with stitches still poorly done. They can walk; they don’t bleed anymore. So why look at this poorly stitched wound that, nonetheless, has not yet healed?

Well, I woke up laughing at myself, thinking that my life was not boring, not even in dreams, and that now it was time for "Thiara Curie" to return to reality and go have her coffee.

Still, as always, I decoded messages from my dreams, and many of them turned out to be premonitory or prophetic. I asked myself what this dream was trying to tell me.

I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how much I can see the beauty in things, nor the hunger I have for knowledge and for everything that is still hidden simply because no one has searched for it.

It doesn’t matter how much I can see or bring to light what no one else can, nor how much I try to show people that just because, in the past, something colorful and beautiful was a powerful contaminant, it doesn’t mean they will now see grace or potential for transformation in anything that resembles such similarities.

In the end, I must content myself with the solitude of my journey, which is so different from theirs. Because I also cannot and do not want to live without glasses, but my glasses and my colorful substances are of no use to them. At least not before a preceding chaos.

It hurts to see and taste the pain in people. It hurts even more because I know that what keeps them there is that they’ve become accustomed to their pet pains. Perhaps they will only truly seek the taste of a life without pain or pursue knowledge without succumbing to chaos when their wounds are so large that there are no threads left to sew them or when their wounds stop them from walking, forcing them to crawl and beg for knowledge and recognition of their own pain.

Meanwhile, they are scared and forget how it was when they had an empty wardrobe. Even if they look at their clothes, accessories, and belongings and see that nothing fits anymore, even if the clothes are faded and torn, they prefer the discomfort of trying to shut the doors, which no longer close naturally because they’re pushed out by all that clutter of useless things spilling over.

Sometimes, they donate a few items and throw others away, but they panic at the thought of an empty wardrobe.

They think about buying new things to replace the old or receive clothes that now fit, donate something, and hope something new can take up space in that immense mess that often extends to the floor. And even though they leave no space, they still hope something new can fit in the middle of it all.

Every day, they complain, and deep down, they know what they need to do. Yet they sit on their beds, open all the half-open doors of their wardrobes, and lament the fading of their clothes as if expecting them to regain their colors, as if the time it took for those colors to disappear was for nothing.

They punish and blame themselves for the time they wore those clothes, questioning whether, if they had cared for them better, the colors would still be there. They despise the time those clothes were part of their daily lives and get stuck reminiscing about when they bought them, their new smell, and their vibrant colors.

They look for something to wear and find torn clothes, always running late because they waste so much time questioning what they did to cause the threads of their garments to break. They chastise themselves for the burnt holes left by the cigarettes they smoked. In the end, they feel so responsible and loyal to everything they keep in there that they grab any old shirt that no longer fits and head to the shop around the corner looking for new clothes, even though they know they won’t fit since they aren’t willing to make room for them.

It seems that my wardrobe now only holds white lab coats stained with supposedly radioactive substances. The more I touch them, the more colorful they become and the more the substance spreads. But the more it spreads, the less I feel I can touch them.

I sit on my bed, open the doors of my wardrobe, and think.

What a mess! If I take them out to wash, I’ll contaminate my entire house. If I touch them, my whole home will become colorful and bright, and when I have visitors, everyone will judge me because they’ll find that brightness suspicious since it reminds them of something from their past.

I can’t even think about wearing them again because their colors will stick to me, and when I walk around, they will create chaos.

Therefore, I must content myself with the solitude of knowledge and my discoveries since I’ve already realized that just as they cannot or do not want to see what I see, I cannot live without colors in the black-and-white world they all prefer to live in.

Thiara Màtos.