A Strange Reality (Chapter One)

There has always been a question in my mind for as long as I can remember. A very specific question. Yet something so illusive that it seemed to twinkle in and out of existence. A question that had a way taking many forms, picking apart my self conscious mobility until I’d become trapped in a state of mundane acceptance. I would wake in the middle of dreams to feel as if I could possibly be on the verge of pronouncing it, only to have it slip beyond the grip of reality. I’ve always assumed that I would one day find the answers; as if age and experience would uncover the mysteries of my youth. But here I am, still asking the same questions. Still dreaming the same dreams.

I fell in love once. Fell so hard that I’d almost forgotten about all the other elements of life. She was an enigma to me. She filled my every existence with a kaleidoscope of desire. I’d found a new optimistic appraisal for a life in which the flowering development of expectations would eventually take control of my entire soul. In the end I was left with a broken heart, and a new found appreciation for subtle, but important details. I was still young, but even then I had felt as if the weight of the world were crushing. My mind had grown old and the sorrow of my emotion seeped from me like a mound of dripping candles, smashed together in an unrecognizable form from the colors of my life.

When I turned seventeen I left home and never returned. My father would say, with no amount of certainty, that It was my own way of shutting out the responsibilities that I should have faced head on. He used to tell me that if I were ever going to escape my problems, I needed to grow up and stop placing the blame on my mother and him. He was right, of course. I blamed them for everything. I wanted to be free and I didn’t even understand what it meant to be free. Hours of my youth were spent floating around in a universe of fantastic proportions. I drank on the beaches of philosophy till the stars swam with possibilities. I danced before the setting moons of the desert, dripping in the rains of LSD, cowering and pleading with what I had believed to be my deliverance. And all the time, the questions were never answered. The meaning of the dreams never revealed.

For years I lived as a unit in a culture of mushrooms, hash, friendships beyond syntax, and deep drum waves of emotion. Living in tents and streets and strange houses. Shifting through the seasons of mental revelations. Terrified and fearless and hopeless and invisible. But I got older. And slowly and without a sudden certainty, things changed. And time seemed to change. And on the eve of one October night the beginnings of a story worth telling unfolded.

I remember the leaves on the trees had become a striking mixture deep reds, smooth browns, and an overall vivid wave of brilliant orange. The sound on the wind seemed mournful to me, and within every gentle breeze there was an exhale of sorrow, casting a quiver of leaves to dance and swim throughout the surface of the streets. Twilight had brought a dark blanket of greyness to loom low over the rooftops of old broken homes, homes that had devolved into black shadows of abandoned memories.

Within one home was a flicker of candle light, casting a warm glow through an attic window. It’s light seemed strange and unnatural, like the illumination of a trapped spirit. I cupped the candle flame in the center of my palms, hypnotized in the thoughts that never seem to materialize. Jill sat further than I’d wanted her to, seated on the floor with her back to the wall and her left arm hanging limply over one raised knee. Her head lay slumped over that arm with a shimmer of sleek black jaw length hair, and in her hand, the last remains of a cigarette, barely hanging within the grasp of her finger tips.

I crawled over to her and reached in to lift her head up, cupping her face in my hands as I had done a hundred times. "Jill! Wake up, Jill!" I slapped her in the jaw and her eyes immediately popped wide open. She looked around the room as if seeing it now for the first time. Her cigarette fell to the floor and I stood up to stomp it out. "You lit that and never even took a drag. Are you ok?," I asked.

"I’m fine," Jill said flatly. A hint of hostility seeping crisply through her tone.

I tried to divide the darkness in order to see the response on her face, but my sight had not yet adjusted. There was only the light of the candle to reflect the calculating sparkle within Jill’s eyes, and the candle was about to die out. Instead I sat down beside her and looked around the room. The flicker of dying flame made the dimensions of the room swim though the swelling darkness. She scooted up close and looked sternly at me through the deep penetrating depths of her watery eyes. I expected that she wanted to say something but she didn’t. She just stared at me, looking wild and psychotic with intent. I reached into the pocket of my blue corduroy coat and pulled out a pack of cloves, lighting one and then offering the pack to her. She ignored the offer with just a slight shake of her head, and I leaned back against the wall, staring up at the dark water stains that blotted the ceiling. I could feel her eyes boring into me like fingernails on the back of my neck. She obviously had something on her mind and after a few more moments of pointed silence I asked, "What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking about Heather and Tod."

Heather and Tod had died a few months ago in a car accident. It had just started to drizzle and the streets had became slick from the oils when Tod nearly drifted into another car. He over compensated for the turn and they ended up flipping the car three times before landing upside down in a river that ran along the side of the road. They drowned in that river. Either they had been stuck and unable to climb out or they were just too high to realize.

Jill had never talked about it other than the initial acknowledgment of it being a terrible thing to have happened to them. She had grown up with them, gone to the same schools with them, gotten high with them. I remember thinking how unemotional she had seemed about the whole thing. "What about Heather and Tod?" I asked.

She reached over and grabbed the pack of cloves. "I ran into Tod’s mom over at the thrift store the other day." She lit one and took a few long drags. "She recognized me before I new who she was."

"What did she say to you?"

"Well at first she just waved to me. I looked away and pretended not to see because I wasn’t sure, but then on my way out she caught up to me and asked me how I’d been doing. I lied and told her I was finishing up a degree at UCSD."

I laughed at her like an ass, smoke billowing out my nostrils like a cartoon demon. "Why the fuck did you tell her that?"

She looked sad. "I don’t know," she said softly.

I felt bad for laughing at her. "Well, why lie? Who cares what she thinks?"

With a sigh and a small shrug she said, "I don’t know. I just couldn’t think of anything to say to her. And then an instant later I realized who she was and it just came out of my mouth like I had no control."

"So you made it up," I said. "Who cares? What’s the matter with you?"

She took another few drags and then started to get up. "Let’s get the fuck out of here," she said, offering her hand to help me on my feet.

"Where to?" I asked.

"Let’s just drive. We’ll figure it out."

Her little black civic was parked outside on the dead lawn. Daddy had bought it for her a few years back on her 18th birthday. There was sort of an unspoken understanding between us. I introduced her and kept her domesticated within the sub culture of underground communities, and she was more or less my sugar mama, making it possible for me to stay high and keep on partying without ever having to come down and hold a job. Her grandfather had left her a huge fortune when he died. But she couldn’t touch it till she turned twenty five. That gave her two more years but until then daddy gave her a nice little allowance that could support her in a moderately beneficial state of comfort. It also allowed us to maintain a modest circulation of ecstasy with which we reputably sold at parties and clubs. I never did understand these ritzy high society type parents who basically handed everything to there kids on a silver platter of fortune. Were they truly that blind?

Along with the little bit of golden brown we had smoked off foil in the attic, I also took a few hits of ecstasy and as I climbed into the car I could feel it coming on strong. Everything in my vision seemed to be vibrating. My blue corduroy coat started to feel more like a silky pelt of fur on my skin, and a sharp insecureness of panic and anxiety began to overwhelm my senses.

Jill climbed into the driver side and then noticed my half faced grin and high arched eyebrows as I struggled to keep my eyes from closing. "Are you rolling?," she asked.

The only answer I could give was a rub down my legs with the palms of my hands and a slight rock back and forth. She cocked her head to the side and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, then shuffled through her ipod’s music and put on a deep base driven track of club trance. My insecureness instantly vanished and my vibrating vision began to trace patterns in the music. I was thrown back in my seat as Jill pealed out off the drive way and accelerated down the street like a beaming combustion of overactive four wheeled energy. The street lamps flew by in a dreamlike streak of electrons and protons, surging us along through a conductor pure exhilaration.

And again, just as I’ve always done in such conscious states of release, I began to drift into the deep crevice of my thoughts , studying my soul as if I were a stranger, and staring back into the face of a flawed vision.

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The Existance Of Thoughts (An Introduction To A Strange Reality)

I once dug too deeply for the answers to questions that weren’t entirely meant to be answered. The sort of intolerable entity’s in secrets that haunt you regardless of whether you act to have them opened or not. But the real question is simply, to be, or not to be.

Yes, of course, I can guess what your thinking. But having bestowed such thought into this simple and used up cliche, I’ve found that the truth of it is packed securely within my own understanding and ideological insight. To me, this Shakespearian quote has something of a double meaning. Or perhaps even an endless use for explanations too fine printed to seek out an exact definition for all of our shrewd dilemmas that have become too hazed over with personal complications to see the black or the white mantle of persona.

Am I to be, or not to be? Not to be slandered with shallow descriptions of where, what, when and why. Such petty revelations that only accomplish themselves to be tossed about for self tortured aspires of mind plunging determination. Or is it a matter of simply existing without answers. To be swallowed in a maze of fantasizing what-ifs and wishfully born disasters. I certainly don’t wish to enchant myself with meaningless false deliveries. Nor to wave frantically with the whipping snap of the white surrendering banner that gloats before us all as if mocking the arrogant affairs of poor mankind.

My will has taken a vision in form that will last long through the spiraling trails towering high in the roads of a gigantic sky. Here were the clouds reach tantalizingly close to the limitless cosmos. In the poetic soul of every demanding desperation. In the choices of which we all must exist. In a strange reality.