I am trying to love the burning effigy of this world. My hands are where I want them. Together and pressed against the radiator. I rearrange the disaster of my face. Like the night before, I will outsource my terror. Let a global team of experts select the precise shade of collapse. Behold our glorious age, where even divination requires credentials. Green. Chosen twice, four years apart. First, it’s the colour of Khidr’s cloak. Algae and anesthetised fury. Link’s humble tunic. The green waters of Guadalquivir. Bitter lushness of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Dollar bills and Ashura processions. A green first mentioned in the King James Bible, as fig leaves envelope a stripped pair. Their heads hang low. Exile is the skin turned inside out, the lover’s final glance. An iridescent slug trailing a path down your leg. Blood spatters foliage. The lion stares blankly. The undergrowth rustles. Green destitutes the eye, leaving you no choice but to sink. Studies have linked this particular shade to increased happiness and general well-being. Studies have proven inconclusive. Epicurus believed in pleasure as the starting point of every choice and aversion. A green traffic light is a pronouncement of surrender. I want you to walk ahead of me, in this life and the next.
Then, a phosphoric tint, the bubble of swamps and hackers. Jungle insurgency green. A foot claimed by gangrene. Bucolic Green Hills, delivered by Napa Valley insect pests and Windows XP. That year they called it Midnight Mass, or maybe Emerald. Names congeal into genres. Genres turn into traps. A thousand oil fields burn, and still the urge persists. Snap the twig from the limb. Assess the feeling of a sweaty hand against your neck. Dying succulents. Y2K Eco Futurism. Code rain soaking our boots. Neon-lit slogans. Children awash with morbid fascination. Their lives already feel like unearned loot. Like getting away with something. I was one of them once, and so were you. We sat in front of the TV, squeezing Capri-Sun pouches with ruinous force, bathed in the glow of Shock and Awe. Live coverage of authorized slaughter. Baghdad on a cool spring morning. Night-vision green. Signals and targeting grids. The green of the hunt. Our dreams were sterile. We had the intelligence of prey. Our small bodies crashed into the millennium.
