The Yellow Coronation

I.

I am not mad. Of this, dear reader, I can assure you. There are those who would seek to convince you otherwise, who seek to degrade my credibility and assassinate my character in order to dismiss my prophecy as the blasphemous ramblings of the insane. They are afraid, as they should be, for they will be swallowed underneath the surging tides of change that will usher forth a new age. The Yellow Coronation is nigh!

I have written this text as a way to catalogue my thoughts and explain the circumstances that brought about such radical change in my character. It all started on a cold winter night when I read that forbidden play known as The King in Yellow. Throughout the tumultuous acts that followed even I began to doubt my sanity. I thought my visions to be no more than the hallucinations of opium withdrawal coupled with my vivid imagination. But this is fallacy. I am not crazy, my eyes have merely been opened to the truth. I shall endeavor to help you understand that. May the King bless you, as he has blessed me.

Up until that illuminating event I had been living in the slums of the city. Another starving artist in its subjugated and vagrant masses. Times were hard. I had no steady means of income and my paintings were met with little interest. I had been squatting in the remains of a once lavish and now decrepit apartment with my friend Georgie, who also fancied himself a painter (though what he painted I haven't the scarcest idea). As far as I could tell Georgie's only passions lay in jamming needles into his veins and lounging about in a drug-haze, a hobby which he indulged in daily. While I would sometimes partake in the ingesting of these poisonous and mind-altering substances, I did so only under the pretext of enlightenment, for I had heard that many famous creative souls attributed their muses to those found at the end of a needle or the bottom of a bottle. However, this method was of little success for me. At the end of my drug-riddled journeys I could remember little, and the times I chose to paint under its numbing effects I came out the other side hating what I had produced.

I began to ponder suicide. First as just a fickle caprice that I hoped would galvanize me, but as time wore on I began to give it more gravity. The only thing that held me back was my utter lack of accomplishment, I couldn't bear to part from the world having produced nothing of value. So I continued on, churning out amateurish work and indulging in all the debauchery the slums provided.

It was around this time that I began to suffer long bouts of insomnia. Sometimes I wouldn't sleep for weeks. I could feel my mental facade beginning to crack and my grip on reality becoming more and more tenuous. Sleep became the only escape from the cacophony of my mind, so I turned to the one substance that offered release. Opium. Georgie found some from a dealer of some repute amongst the underworld, and he shot me up with it nightly. The drug addled my mind and gave me strange and disquieting dreams, but it allowed me to sleep and that was all I craved. Addiction ensued. It was not long before I was taking it at all hours of the day and night. For months I lived in a constant fugue, walking through life and remembering nothing. I gave up art. I barely ate. I lost my soul. Then I met Katrina.

We met in a crowded and ramshackle drug den in Chinatown. I was there to score more dope from Georgie's connect. After eight hours of forced sobriety my nerves were frayed and I was fiending for the next fix. Ultimately, the dealer never showed and after about two hours of restless waiting I lost control; I punched holes in the graffitied drywall, screaming and cursing all the while. Her hand seemed to burst up from nowhere to grab me and pull me to the floor. I cocked my fist to lash out at my restrainer, but then I noticed her eyes: they were two different colors. Her left eye was seafoam green while her right was hazel, almost golden in appearance. She was looking intently at me, through me, and I got lost in those polychromatic pools, deep and mysterious as ocean. Without speaking she pressed a capsule into my palm. I didn't even look at it, just placed it on my tongue and dry swallowed it down. She downed a capsule of her own then we sat in silence, waiting.