The fact of the matter is, for all the vitriolic sensation that is the fruits of your imprisonment, much of your life as a world-famous kidnapped unholy Jesus is rather beige.
Beige.
Like a tub of yellowed Walmart vanilla ice cream.
Beige.
Like the nuisance sun seen through your squinting eyes on a day that was supposed to be shrouded in charcoal and rain.
Beige like the rose-pink sneakers you bought when everything still seemed possible that now have faded to muddy, like your memories of the dead.
Beige like batting lights adorning the drones and satellites circling your enormous head in the night sky. And beige like the plastic lining the gray curtains meant to cancel every morning until further notice.
And still even beige like the blanket atop the steel table where they botched your dog’s death, and beige like their 1/8-hearted apology for misspelling her name on the little sack that holds the dust of her.
Beige like the sanitized portrayals of your captivity.
Beige like so many manila folders stacked in the corner of a room where, you fantasize, forthright government people are doing the math to solve the problem of your kidnapping and of you as a figure.
Beige like this planet-wide maze of red tape. Walls and walls and walls and walls of the beigest red tape you have ever seen.
Even beiger still, like the ash-brown half-moons that cradle your beige bloodshot eyes.
Your skin the night you almost died.
Clouds like Pixar marshmallows, soft and beige, chalk-white and beige, splattered with the beige blood of your enormous head.
Beige like the sparkly iridescence of Instagram.
Beige like 500,000 unseen posts. And beige like the seen ones too.
As beige as a celebrity, the beigeness of glitz. And glamour. All the beigeness of unrequited fame. Of who you are and whatever it is you have done or not done or tried to do.
The beige abyss to which they have crazy-glued your eyeballs.
The beigeness of the whites of your bloodshot eyeballs, of waking up beige and eating beige and drinking beige and smoking beige and pissing and shitting out the leftover beige, of twilight and limbo and death and motherhood and desertion and lost freedom and all that tried to be but never was and all that could possibly someday perhaps be but probably won’t.
Beige.
Another mere shade of beige.
Diana Spindler 