Light and Blood

har·le·quin

 [hahr-luh-kwin, -kin]

noun

1.

( often initial capital letter  ) a comic character in commedia dell'arte and the harlequinade, usually masked, dressed in multicolored, diamond-patterned tights, and carrying a wooden sword or magic wand.

There is a stark juxtaposition. It mingles coquettishly. It drums as soft as a heartbeat in filtering sunlight, the morning a steady stir on shadowed sheets and pillows. First and foremost, there is light - almost like the color of doves alongside a church at noon, almost like the nauseous whirr of hospital gowns. But it is dawn, a moody, ghoulish dawn, and light is scarce and muddled with edges of suffocating dark in a harlequin's smile.

It is like a daze, a daydream, and a high-pitched laugh running through fields of rice, conjured up with the defying help of a handful of affairs of escapism - the humming and droning of a radio. The harlequin's hair is spunky and fiery in a sleepy amber light that topples over ridges of encyclopedias and cosmetics rolling over each other in drizzles of paper cutouts. Powder is tinted on cheeks and ears of wavering red in time. The harlequin likes the spasmic route of cream and roses and cows over the moon in the little attention she strikes her cheekbones with. Her countenance is then briefly masqueraded, albeit only awhile as there is still a couple of hours before she stations herself.

Our harlequin's breath is tinged with nearly indistinguishable lines of coy and demure desires. It hangs patiently on an impish smile, before given permission to cascade over her lengthy reflection in a sigh that ventures with bits of soul. She nips at her cherry lip and shades her eyelids with smoke, rising up from her chair in juddering beats. She is made of light, her fingertips lined with butter from popcorn and laminated photographs in photo albums.

Her shoulders are overly taut under the sunrise's soft gaze. She awkwardly shuffles her feet across the floor to check on her smile again, but it's a hundred blinks and breaths too late. Light and blood and sandpaper and lunch boxes and inner monologues are never the best components of a clown's potpourri, or at least of her performance's potpourri. And strawberries are self-served on ceramic dishes, but our harlequin is parched for light and blood only. She is left to ruminate about these in the timeless stillness of her room, quite an interim between breathing and doing, before she is given the choice to choose between (1) performing and (2) being.