I came to already standing in a world as foreign as the back of my hand. It took me moments to blink out the final dots of uncertainty as this foreign world slowly morphed into a familiar but yet unfamiliar scene. I turned around almost instinctively, automatically greeting those around me. We were just a couple of budding adults grouped around the broken remnant of what could be called the battered parking lot of a building. It was no question that we were all doped up on some mind altering magic. Petty smiles and half open eyes were all the evidence that I needed. This was a strange feeling that I had not experienced before. One were to expect terror and confusion when one wades through a swamp of sticky trouble and muck, I was calm and collected. It was almost like I had finally felt some sort of inner peace, it was all quite nightmarish and alarming.
Once the silence had been broken, I had spent three seconds questioning my inner self if I had indeed greeted those around me with absolute silence, not even the sound of clapping hands or the bristle of loose clothing with rough skin. My inner intuition was not one that regarded itself as an active individual. It guided me along my life with simple prods and pokes and sat back down, its hands crossed with a sly smile, poking me when I needed, a sort of instinctive dejavu if one were to have to call it something. I turned around to Sam, his shrill voice penetrating the white noise of this strange world.
“Hey buddy, It’s Sven!” Sam bawled from the groggy distance. I squinted my eyes towards him, the world a shimmer and swaying in the disappearing horizon. He was basked in a world that spun upon itself, like looking far across a desert landscape, the heat shimmering untold secrets of oasis’s and water fountains. I closed my mouth, how long had my mouth been hanging? The question exited my mind just as quickly as it had entered it.
“Get over here! This Instant!” The dream-like Sam now yelled commandingly. I knew not what caused the feeling of dread inside my guts but I decided to follow my gut and run away. My sneakers hit the broken pavement in the opposite direction.
“SVEN, SVEN, STOP IT, WHY ARE YOU RUNNING, SVEN!?” Bellowed the now crazed animal that charged in my general direction, at least I think it was my general direction. If one were to witness a crazed animal running towards them yelling their name, would it be safe to assume that they were after them? The question seemed rhetorical to say the least, but I thought of it anyway.
I opened my eyes, not knowing that I had closed them. Sam was with me once again, not the animal that I thought was after me. We were mindlessly talking about something, the subject of which had left me while I was running away from him. Was I actually running from him? I craned my head to my left to see another person, a white girl. Her face had looked like it was peppered from up close by a high powered shotgun filled with cute little freckles. I remember thinking that she was indeed very pretty, so I went along with my previous thought and thought that she was indeed very pretty.
When I turned back my attention to Sam, I realized that he was attempting to give me some sort of advice. I nodded and raised up my top lip, pretending to be absolutely interested. The points Sam was giving to me were absolutely interesting and I found myself being entranced by what he was saying.
It was during one of his passionate explanations of potted plants that I found myself half-dazed. It was an out of body experience that seemed to be happening, not surprisingly, out of my body. I watched myself as I grabbed the girl that I remember thinking was very pretty and began vigorously inserting my tongue into her mouth. I watched as her surprised face turned into a more accepting face. It was all quite poetic if you think about it.
Her little giggles had enticed me to continue. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves laughing hysterically out of our minds. She had given me great kudos, saying that I had a great start and good middle with the movements of everything I had done. We continued to laugh until I suddenly had a strange feeling of pure disappointment as I realized this was 1st.
I opened my opened eyes once again at a gated building. I could not see the building itself but I assumed that it was of course safe to assume that the gate in which I could not see over held within it a building in which I could not see. The gate itself resembled that of a modern day slum gate with the faintness of the slightly upper middle class who drove civics and drink on occasion. I took a quick step back and saw the building itself with a civic resting on the driveway.
I felt the once idle intuition poke at me, retreating back into its comfortable lazy boy chair in the depths of my mind as it ignited the cogs of action into my head, reaching into my legs. Though it had indeed been the first time I had seen this place, I found myself not bothering to use the now rusted metal gates that were towering over me. Instead I took the alternative route and started to scale the building using idle structural objects around the walls themselves to gain any footing what so ever. Navigating through the urban jungle like a metal monkey, I had finally managed to scale the massive gate and found myself looking down seven stories. I furrowed my brow, not remembering scaling such a high building, let alone noticing that it was a building I had just scaled. I broke through a window with my fist and entered the room nearest to me, it was room 717.
I was welcomed by a slur of partied souls that on different occasions I might have regarded as my friends of friends that automatically made them friends. I’ve never actually met these people enough to consider them true friends, I knew not of their habits or if they had ordered the soda or diet soda from the McDonalds, thus they were not my friends. The word acquaintances come to mind. I knew that sliding through this battlefield of half drunken people was not going to be a very easy task, it would involve contorting my body to unlikely god forsaken shapes and sliding between timed gaps in this ocean of broken dreams of love. I found myself contorting my body in an unlikely god forsaken shape sliding between people as I came to, letting my inner thoughts wash over me like a warm delightful shower. I had a half glazed look and stood in a strange shape before finally blurting out with the top of my lungs “EVERYBODY ON THE FLOOR GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY.” It all happened in delicious slow motion. The mass of people parted like the red sea for the eager Moses. Debris from the parted individuals littered the floor, it seemed like those attending this quite big party had no limits as to what to bring. As I maneuvered my way through the now parted crowd, I took note of the stacks of illegal and legal prescription drugs that I ran past, the alcohol bottles, and the boxes of General Lee’s Boxed Mandarins that laid helter-skelter upon the floor.
I was now stumbling around, the parted sea of bodies seemed to have converged once again into a now manageable blob of party. I was receiving my own fill of pick me ups and put me downs from hands that seemed to not be attached to a body. I drank and popped and sniffed my own fill of fun before I had, by absolute chance, bumped into an old friend of mine. Kelly was once an innocent girl whom I was great friends with. I looked upon her with squinted eyes as I realized just how much of a façade she had become, a shell of her former self. She noticed me loafing around and quickly engaged me in conversation, it almost seemed like she was expecting me.
“Sven is that you? It is you!” Kelly pronounced. She sounded like the girl I knew formerly, this one was but a shell, did I mention that?
“How is everything? Oh my god are you okay? What’s new with you? Done anything lately?” Without missing a beat I answered the barrage of questions thrown at me in a heartbeat, I left sufficient time for this exchange of words to come to a sudden and silent halt. I found myself in some sort of fighting position, my hands in a karate chop fashion looking upon this shell of a Kelly.
“You should meet my boyfriend,” She continued, completely disregarding the fact that I was in such a position that I could rip off her shelly Kelly throat if I deemed her unworthy.
She continued, “You should totally meet my boyfriend, He’s a really good boyfriend, and you know what? I’m going to grab my boyfriend so you can talk to my boyfrieeeeeend,” Kelly the Shell blurted this all out to fill the sudden silence. I recoiled in pain, my hands shielding my face from this shell monster. I was unaware of the events that unfolded after that, perhaps it was the copious amounts of prescribed hallucinogens I previously allowed into my system at my earlier arrangement, or maybe the few beers that I had managed to snag while roaming around this party, it might actually even be the mandarin that I had found from one of the General Lee’s Boxed Mandarin’s I found myself eating which contained at least five uppers and downs unknown or known to the medical field. Whatever it was I found myself dealing with a drug trip I couldn’t best.