Why is it I always find myself laying in the wet grass staring up at constellations with a set of chromosomes lighting up a cigarette that don’t belong to you?
This time the LSD flowed through the veins of a boy with blonde flowing hair. I laid next to him and tried to keep up with and envision what he saw and felt that night, and I think he could tell that I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant when he tried to describe it and he sighed with the faintest hint of frustration, but I reassured him with a simple
“talk about it.”
And he began to.
to use his hands, silhouettes against the dark violet sky, twirling and dancing, the stars twinkling and shining light between the shadowed fingers like the sun through trees. he described looking up at a circle of white light of life, and from it stemmed four hallways or paths, and then how there was a giant hand in the sky plucking at the stars, and then how the stars “danced, almost seductively, (no, seductively isn’t the right word, but it’s the easiest way to explain it)” for his eyes only. And how he was melting into the grass on our backs and the way Something by the Beatles made him feel something, and he asked about my writing and understood my anxiety and traced his tattoos in the dark, painting pictures of the ones I’d never noticed, the sparrow, the compass, the hamsa, with his words.
I felt as if I were tripping too, like the tiny tab dissolved into my own tongue for forty five minutes until it made it’s way down the back of my throat with a sip of water. Like I could feel myself melting into psychedelia with each syllable that rolled smoothly off of his tongue. Like the giant hand in the sky was mine, and I plucked the little lights like the strings of a guitar, like they burned my fingertips the way the flames from lighters did when I tested how slowly I could wave them over my fingers before I felt the heat when I was a child. Like the earth grew into me, like vines slithered their way up my spine and my vertebrae blossomed into lotus flowers, like Something by the Beatles made me feel something.
The earth was raw; it was so real.
Yet reality had never felt farther in a sober state.
I felt touched and untouchable, invincible and invisible, desired and deserted.
We finally stood and walked away from our little bed of leaves but they didn’t want me to leave- they tangled themselves in my hair and he told me to leave them in because it looked lovely.
So I did.
And I found you, where I always do.
You were laughing your acid off in the fluorescent lights of your bedroom.
And your eyes were green and your cheeks pink and your palms open and your mind
untouched by the untouched beauty we experienced and the enlightening clarity and the knowledge we sought under the all-knowing night sky.
So once again, please tell me, where does it go when you’re not surrounded by it?