A Trip

    The world slipped away without much aplomb and left me sitting there, shivering. The reality which quietly took its place seemed at first to be a friendly one. The colors here were bright and inviting, the texture of everything had been blurred and reconfigured clumsily, leaving a graininess that made focusing impossible. For a while I was happy in my colorful confusion, content to experience the little men which danced on my jeans, their feet piercing my skin with small icicles in a sensation that at once was excruciating, and yet the most pleasurable feeling I’d experienced.

     My reverie was broken the minute Adam spoke. His voice was disgusting, nasally and judgemental, it belied every delusion he held about himself and the world around him.

     “I feel like salvia is a crazy high, do you guys feel it?” He gloated at us, preening in the knowledge that he had done this before.

     A deeper voice answered, coming from the bundle sitting in the chair to my right.

“I don’t feel it yet, maybe it’s not going to hit me”

     During their exchange, my perspective had shifted. I was no longer looking at the porch from my position behind its railing. My point of view had slid away from me, until I was seeing the scene from above and in front, digesting information as if I were standing on the porch steps and staring down at the action. From my new position, the reality of where and what I was dawned quickly and without mercy. I was high. With people I did not respect, sitting on the porch of a cabin in the woods. The dancing little men had left. Now it was just cold. I was in the bottom of a deep hole, and as I stared upwards the light ran farther and farther away from me. I was trapped. It was over. Adam began to dive into a speech, cradling his speaker like a life raft as he timed his self-indulgence to peak with the ebb and flow of the music. His partner was nodding in appreciation. He reminded me of a bear, his movements were slow and powerful, and his mind though sharp, was sluggish and made connections slowly. Together they amplified each other, they forced each other into pretension and depravity, they took away the filters until all that was left was the raw stupidity of the proletariat. It filled the air and clogged the lungs. It choked my eyes in a cloud of impenetrable fog.

     This was the past, the present and the future. This was what I was hurtling towards. There was no escape on the east coast. New York was not a place of salvation, it was just a more concentrated bubble of idiocy. Then came the despair, the self-realization. Wave after wave of earth shattering, mind-altering discoveries.

     I am a coward. I am afraid of everything. I am afraid of inferiority. I am afraid of failure. I am afraid of work. I am afraid of the truth. I am afraid to be alone. I am afraid of conflict. I am afraid of solitude, I am afraid of being known, I am afraid of being unknown. I am afraid of intimacy. I am a coward

     The sensation came quickly and left quickly. It had all been true, but the second it passed there was no drive to fix myself. There was only a metallic taste around my tongue, and a fence wrapped around the middle of my chest. It was despair, true and utter despair. My head was glued to my shoulders and there was no escape, not from the situation, and not from the world. The music was still playing, the would be poets still discharging into each other’s waiting ears. The cowardice had left me weak, and when the song ended, and their expectant eyes looked to me; I had not the strength to do anything but weakly refuse, and then close my lips with finality.

     I could tell they were disappointed. They wanted to be there for me; they were still my best friends after all, and yet they had failed me. It was my fault, I held them to a standard they could not reach, and then cried as my esteem for them crumbled. I had been a fool. I had always been a fool, and I likely would continue to be one until I died. I was nothing but a cowardly, lecherous fool, and everyone around me could sense it. I had no purpose, I should have been dead. I wanted to be dead.

     The song ended, and a new one began, but this time I couldn’t breathe. Lucy in the Sky had crushed my lungs and squeezed my heart in fear. I cried for the death of my grandfather, I cried for the death of my innocence, and I cried for the shortcomings. There was no end to them, and they crushed me. They crushed me until I was nothing. They crushed me for an hour and a half, and then I got up, packed my chair and left; walking through the woods with my two confidants. We walked until we reached the hill leading to the street, and we walked into the fog that was broken only by the single bulb of a streetlight. We walked into a car, and I sat in my shame. We walked into death, and I cried.