We Are the Support Beams We've Been Waiting For

Is it me, or is that rainbow growing a little bit every day?

Like it used to be a baby rainbow, misting and low to the ground, and then it started to march, softly at first, the twin ends only grazing the edges of the page, and it began to conform to the restrictions of the page and it blossomed downward, overflowing, scrolling and smearing along with gravity, and I was happy because I have a very human sense of growth, see, I see something getting bigger because I imagine it is healthy and dominating its environment like it must, like it was supposed to when it made itself from raw materials, willing to manifest itself as an unbelievable challenge to our eyes and our theories of sensory correlations, and then it could begin to reproduce itself, splitting into bow-lettes, single, double-colored rims, long sedimented edges flaking off the original, the first rainbow, and then it could become very sorry to see them go and softly with bug eyes and cigarette moles, it could drift in its late fifties with no reason to shine, to mark the edges of the spectrum, and it could get old; it could become as a grandpa Rainbow, sadly remembering graduations and evaporations it will never see, shrinking and aging and becoming a husk for itself, wide like screens are wide, faded and not a rainbow anymore because it could be missing its colors, the less important ones, the ones in between, and the baby rainbows could climb upon the elementary structures that are left behind like shells to keep them warm on a darkening afternoon.

But now I am reminded that this is all very human of me, and not of rainbows; a rainbow refuses being, it is transient and arrives in bursts, it does not remain in any spot to be captured or calcified, and not because it is strong with a free spirit, but because others are stronger.

Because this rainbow is like others I've heard people say about, notorious and selfish, it will smash and squash and spit on the babies, dominating their space and squeezing their prematurity from them, rinsing itself in them, fostering its own sparkling displays like a Stalinist fountain, softly and alone in the room once, now old ephemera is slippery and plastic and stuck in the ground, intent on dominating where it's let to roam.

It is definitely growing now, we can be sure of it. Measuring does no good, that's for humans again, humans who get little notches on the kitchen door frame, not for rainbows, they are sized, measured by a sharpened eye that can scale it up and down to count all the little bits of dust and water and the million little mirrors of one person's face, broken and staring away from my eyes, it is untrustworthy.