Stumbling Into a Rabbit Hole

Stumbling Into a Rabbit Hole

I pick up my coffee from the end of the cafe bar, wink at the cute barista, and turn to leave. Except I don’t. Or rather I do. Well, you see, its a bit hard to explain. I turned and tripped down the rabbit hole again. One moment in a cafe in Prague. The next moment, falling face first, streaming coffee behind me like the Exxon Valdez, passing through the ripping currents of time and space. Or maybe just insanity.

I plunge into the shade of mossy green that smells of wetness and muddiness and dankness and the bursting forth of life into itself over and over again. The ouroboros green coils about me and pushes me to the surface. I break through the emerald and take a hard breath of the icy air. I am sticking vertically out of a horizontal mountain dangling from the side of a cliff set over an abyss careening down wildly between two distant peaks. The navel of the world curls and ripples far beneath me and to my right. I still have the coffee cup. It is somehow still full. The navel of the world breathes up with salty, pink lips that say “Drink me.”

So I poured the coffee down and burnt it’s sickly red tongue.

So the world spat me out.

I flew in the haphazard, electric zings of a paper airplane being seesawed by the fickle breeze and strange momentum. I shifted in sharp turns, that made me feel like a stick shift stuck in first gear trying to fight to five. And screeching hiss of a buzz saw on the raw exposed nerve of a tooth filled my skull and poured hot pain into my jaw. I bit down, hard.

I bit myself into enlightenment.

On an orange beach under an orange sky with an orange sea and and orange sea birds and an orange sun that blazed like the ticking hands of a clock, relentless and deaf to pleas for mercy. I held my coffee cup up, the only white thing in a world of orange. And the world fled from it, from the strange color it could not contain. I think every soul in that world perished because of the color white on my coffee cup.

Consciousness slowly seeps like melted gold over an exposed eye, into each and every one of my cells. My liver cells ask one another why, why after so many years of hard and unappreciated work, why now must they again sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Why must they die in order for the whole body to live? Is it not debasing for them? Are not all cells made equal, all from the same stemcells, all created from the same egg and sperm. Why then ought liver cells to die so that brain cells can live and gorge themselves more on caffeine and alcohol and take all the glory for the body’s doing. Other cells in the body listen to the liver cells and some begin to believe, specifically half of the kidneys and a small group of lung tissue groups. But that is enough. Enough to start a revolution. Enough to form a company of Les Amis. Enough for them to kill me.

I douse my body in fiery coffee, the liver cells, in who I am also present, scream in anguish, while fat coated brain cells, my consciousness just as present, trip wildly on a cocaine ride of colors and images and sounds, each of them experiencing the rabbit hole for themselves. My body is agitated, and my consciousness pushed down further into the atoms, bursting thoughts and imagination like bolts of lighting as particles crush against each other like the hot throes of sex. A proton, trailed lamely by a heartbroken electron, crushes into the nearest neutron without thought or consent and destroys it, another heartbroken electron is added to it’s wake of despair.

An ice cold moment of thought triggers the end of the world, when I roll up my empathy inside myself and said factually that emoting on inanimate or unconscious matter does not make a better universe. There is a natural order to this world after all.

I become fumes, flowing downhill, trailing toward some center of gravity beyond my scope or sight. I collect bits and pieces of myself as I fall, more and more of me seems to strive towards that center. A larger collection of myself than I am, grabs the me I am, and pulls me in to be added to me. I know it is where I belong but I also feel myself vaporizing as my autonomy is stolen into the whole. I become a whisper. I become the conscience. Or if not the conscience then something opposite it.

I begin to take on my shape and my shape is smoke, a thick greasy black pillar with lines of lavender and the heady scent of opium burning acidic at my back. I collected harder and grow more pieces as I near the source, which I can now see is a the bowl of a pipe. I collected like flowing smoke, a cinder burning backwards as the smoke coils and flows like water, filling in the spaces of my black body.

Then slowly I start to glow until I am ribbed by bright orange seams, Bright orange like the orange world I destroyed and like the setting sun, when seen through a dust storm. I brighten and glow until I am a firebird of life, the power of combustion is like the sweetest feeling of peace and absolute security in the universe. My reverse incarnation draws more and more smoke into my fiery frame, and I feel a wooden center, untouched by fire, begin to take form. Water is mixed in this white smoke and it curls into my pores, for I am porous now.

In a final smolder, the fire passed down from me as if I am undressing, sliding a silk gown down my bare frame and I stand naked and wooden. I am made of wood, sitting in the bowl of the pipe. A fat finger fishes me out and passes me to a fat, yellow gloved hand. That hand passes me to a fat green gloved hand, and then to a fat blue gloved hand. I pass through every shade of every color of glove until I reach gloves with are the colors of sadness and gloves the colors of shock when you are caught with your pants down for the first time by your parents. And then there were gloves the color of music which made me weep. Finally, I had been passed up by all of the caterpillar’s hands and was facing it’s fat face. It had no eyes. No nose. No ears. Only a mouth and a million hands.

“Did you fetch my coffee as I asked?” The Caterpillar asked, taking a deep nibble into my calve.

“I’m sorry, no.” I look at the now empty coffee cup.

“What is the point of you!” It yells and hurls me against the side of an iron flower, the razer petals cutting deep gashes into my face.

“I’m sorry. I’ll do better.” I wiped my bloodied face and where I touched the blood turned to brilliant carnation petals.

“You do that.” The caterpillar took a deep drag from his hookah bowl. Then let it out in a massive pink cloud, “Well, what are you waiting for!”

The pink cloud engulfed me, consumed me, I coughed, I fell forward, and my hand splashed into the spilled coffee. Which was cold by now. I heard the cute barista gasp behind me, asking if I was okay. I wiped a last red carnation petal off my cheek and ask her to remake my coffee. Again.