Don't worry—real white
looks nothing like a glass
of ice cold milk,
nothing like a bleached
square of toilet paper,
nothing like some freshly
washed bed sheets,
or that special kind of
toothpaste you use;
real white
is something so pure
and true,
it would never let you
just go rubbing up against it
like that.
Real white is so good,
and so right,
it is not even like
the thin, soft light
by which you first recognized
your own face in the mirror.
In fact, real white,
real rightness,
real innocence, and the like—
those things
are much less
like light
and considerably
more like—Einstein's
equations describing it, or
like the time it takes
a cloud to rain
itself clear out of existence.
White is not even a feeling; it's
the feeling of
whichever feeling that was
slowly dissipating
once you understood—it was doing
nothing for you.
