Wish

Today again, I remembered. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes when the wind is blowing smoothly like a river past my face and the night is particularly stark and bright, I can taste it. I can taste its colors and its frames, woody and faintly acrid on my skin, like an aged dark wine. I smell the crispness in the silhouettes of flat trees outlined against a mournful sky, and I hear echoes of colors bouncing through surfaces and spaces etched in lines of leaves. I feel the weight of the earth on my feet as they pass by one another into space as yet undiscovered.

Inevitably, I will succumb and open my eyes, but until then these glimpses that are bare perceptions caress a cloud of euphoria around the points at which my mind probes the world. I always hold out as long as I am able, but each time I become so mesmerized, so entrenched, that I cannot help but want to experience more, feel more, drink more, and I open my eyes.

Tonight it was particularly awful. Every instance of my being was split away from all the others by the currents of resistive purple, deeper than a cliff dive through an icewall. Horrifically, I could see the pain I experienced envelope me as an impenetrable force, deeper in despair than I could have imagined or remembered. I saw the chaos that drives the world apart, and I emerged, like always, screaming and sobbing without coherence or thoughts or even words. Eventually I stopped, but I continue to be, even as I write in this moment, deadened, solitary and confined as these colors bleed around my head indefinitely.