Button

Having dropped  my keys between the couch and the wall, I reached into the gap to retrieve them. While I was feeling around, I found what felt like a button. It was round, made of cold metal, and set in a cold metal base on the floor. Without thinking, I pressed the button because that’s what you do with buttons.

The floor started to shift. Each floorboard pulled in the opposite direction of its neighbors, parting the ground like two combs separating. Beneath, there was no discernable thing, just an intense dark blue glow. Eventually, the floor opened up past the confines of the room and I realized that the floor wasn’t separating, but reality was. The walls, the couch, and my keys all slowly vanished as if they were sounds that were getting further and further away. Soon, there was nothing. There wasn’t even me, at least not a physical me.

I wanted to close my eyes, but I had no eyes. It dawned on me that I wasn’t seeing anything, so closing my eyes would be useless anyway. This was a new kind of perception, one that I had no escape from. I would just be and endure endless nothing with no distraction for the rest of time.

Life of the party

I woke up and everything was upside down. That’s not to say that in front of me was an image that had been turned over, but rather that each individual thing was upside down relative to the things around it somehow. I tried to right myself and realized I was not only already righted, but mid stride in a sprint. I suddenly felt the sensation of speed, but time was somewhere else, maybe having a smoke.

My foot contacted the ground and fled behind me as my other foot came back to the front and followed. A shelved wall full of ornate stuff was approaching, and I found myself in tune with my thoughts. I knew that I could sent a message to my legs to stop, and I could feel how long that message would take to coarse through my body and reach my legs. For one reason or another, I decided not to send the message; ornate stuff be damned.

As I made contact with the wall, a porcelain clown was what was nearest to my face. He just sat there, looking sad and upside down. Sad clowns never made much sense to me.

Crashing through, I lost my sense of being in tune with everything and regained a familiar time frame. Also, I stepped on some ornate piece of junk, sprained an ankle, and tumbled to the ground, pounding my head into a nearby car.

Lying on a concrete driveway with my ankle throbbing and my head split, I felt eyes on me. Glancing back at the doorway I just created, I saw a hoard of people in fancy dress staring back at me.

Corn

The black of the night lent itself to the explanation that all of existence had been condensed into the area illuminated by the motorcycle’s single headlight. From my vantage point behind the headlight (and therefore outside of existence), I was hypnotized by the world as it flashed through this beam of creation and destruction. The speed was enough that no single thing existed for long, and in each item’s brief life it left an impression in the back of my mind, filling me like a pitcher being dunked in the ocean.

Suddenly into the beam came a cornfield. I tried to turn the bike, but I was too slow (the ocean in my head delayed my reaction a bit.) The cornfield surrounded the bike and I, still traveling at speeds high enough to break time into moments. Without time having passed, I was out of the corn field and on my back, with a motorcycle on top of me. I lied and collected myself for a moment, scanning over my body for any specific screaming pain. Before long, I found some.

The bike’s engine was searing against my calf. In a slight panic I yanked at my leg and pushed at the bike, managing to get free. I could smell the burning flesh, but the actual injury didn’t seem that bad. I stood up and limped vaguely around to the front of the bike so I could use the headlight to examine the burn. It was pretty intense, looked like the skin had been torn off just prior to the seer. It hurt, but I could walk. I also noticed in the light a bit of blood on my shirt. I knelt down to examine where it might have come from, and found something unfortunate.

Before I continue, we should talk a bit about corn. Corn is a grain that’s grown as food all across the country. The part used for food is the grain, several dozen of which grow on a cob. Several cobs grow on a thing called a stalk. Corn stalks grow straight up out of the ground in fields. They are between 5 and 9 feet tall, and they have cobs and leaves. The leaves have a broad face and a thin edge, and often from the stalk with a springiness that allows them to gather more sun. Above a certain speed, like water which gains the consistency of concrete, those soft and gentile leaves take on the characteristics of machetes.

I had just careened through a field of machetes, and I did not come out unscathed. Across my stomach was a gash, nearly a foot long and deep…scary deep. Without knowing what else to do, I put my arm over my stomach and applied pressure, trying to keep as many of the guts inside the wound as possible. Using my other arm I righted the bike and started back down the street, with one useless leg and one arm occupied. I couldn’t shift up (my leg just wouldn’t do that motion), and so I weaved down the street drunkenly at 13 miles an hour.

Before long, I was sucked back into the thought that all existence was in the headlight. I found myself gasping for air, and before long I couldn’t fight off the big darkness that was invading from behind my eyes. I felt myself start to topple, but I didn’t feel the ground.

Moongrass

The breeze swept by and danced with the moon soaked blades of grass. Those blades tickled a bit as they brushed against my ears and neck as I laid in the field, staring at the fires that burn far away. The cool air wafted across my skin as I tuned my ears through the crickets, through the rustling of the grass, and listened carefully to the underlying silence. A deep breath revealed a scent in the air, a crisp scent like hydrogen burning miles away. The light in the sky was soft, and my body felt heavy. My eyes drifted closed and I lost time to the night.

My eyes opened, it was still night. The scent still lingered in the air, the grass still tickled my neck, and the breeze was still cool. I tore myself off the ground and rose to my feet slowly. Glancing around, I saw nothing but a boundless moon bathed field. The crickets and rustling were absent; all that remained was the silence.
Realizing that I still hadn’t found time and there wasn’t much else to do, I picked a direction and started walking. I walked for hours, or weeks, or minutes, or decades. The landscape didn’t change; it just reflected the same constant horizon of endless grass.
After a moment of thought, I took a pen out of my pocket and jammed it into the ground as a point of reference. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see it from very far in the dark of the night, I thought the sense of distance would have a reassuring effect.
I walked backwards away from the pen, keeping it in sight and gaining distance on it. As soon as I couldn’t see it anymore, I turned around and kept walking in the same direction. It did feel good, knowing that I had moved, even though the world around me didn’t show it. As I had that thought, I heard a crunch under my foot. It was a pen. Shocked, I picked it up and examined it. It was the same pen.
I panicked. I was trapped in a field of nowhere. Exits were all around me, but they led right back to the same place. Without even realizing it, I fell to the ground sat with my legs sprawled out. Not knowing what else to do, I hurled the pen as hard as I could at the horizon. It hit me in the back of the head.
I let out a sigh.
I wanted time back.
Stupid field.
The horizon burned into me with its endless gaze for what I could only assume was centuries, and then something odd happened. The horizon started to advance on me from all sides. It came at me quick, too quick for me to react to it.
Suddenly, the field was gone. Sucked out of reality along with everything else, and there was just me. It all happened really fast, but as far as I can tell, everything passed into my mind. It nestled in as fond memories which, were unique because I remember not having them.

Alone in the void, I missed the stupid field.

Bubbles

Reality is not one big cohesive entity. Each conscious thing has its own reality, a sort of reality bubble. Each action or thought of that conscious can and often does reshape that bubble in any number of ways, altering not just their perception of reality but their actual reality. What is reality other than perception anyway?

The bubbles don’t adhere to rules based in physics. They can exist in the same place, because they are no place. They can grow and shrink without a balance of energy to draw from or give to, and they only exist in the present.

The bubbles can overlap, allowing one conscious thing to experience things in the way that another conscious thing might. I find that these experiences are particularly powerful when changing the shape of a bubble. Once that conscious thing returns to its home bubble, it finds new corners and edges everywhere.

I suppose the question is, “What lies between the bubbles?”

It’s something we’ve all experienced, I think. When it’s four AM and you’re sitting on a couch with crumbs from the whole pizza you just ate scattered all down your sweat soaked shirt and your bubble just decides to go for a walk, and get away from you for a while. Things around you start to fall apart, and suddenly you’ve been a n impossibly heavy triangle your whole life and every time the glow of the TV flickers it’s like being hit by a train in the face. You squeeze one thought through the constant wreckage that has become your mind, and it’s something primal. “I have to pee.” “But I can’t pee. I’m a triangle. Triangles can’t pee, stupid.”

I’m sure there are other ways to escape your bubble and experience the void. I bet jumping out of a plane would work once or twice. I’ll have to give that one a try.

Hands

As I watch my hands scrawl across the keyboard, I realize how odd they are. Lumps of flesh with sprouts bursting from them that I can make move independently of each other with less than a thought. The sprouts are coated in a slightly damp and hairy leather that’s wrinkled where they bend, showing wear. They’re capped with protective bits of enamel that protrude from under the leather.

 

Weird things, people.

Atmospheric

Reality feels a bit wafty today.

I can reach out to grab something and watch it waft away like the smoke trickling from a single cigarette in an ashtray. The ashtray is sitting in a kitchen that’s just experiencing the first morning light creeping through the blinds, one cool fall day fifteen years ago. The smoke ascends from the ember in a bolt straight line for about two inches, then suddenly starts to dance and flurry and eventually dissipate into the air. I may grab a fork or a piece of mail or just use my hand and waft the smoke about, but in seconds it returns to its natural dance.

I like it. It’s not a bad feeling, in the same way that rain isn’t bad weather. It breeds (or, perhaps, is bred from) complacency.