The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to Disillusionment

Inside Out

"I'm crying. Am I crying?"

Barnabas lifted his hands to his face. His hands did not feel like they were part of his body. They were made of cloth, stuffed with wool. The surface of the skin looked quilted as he watched them approach his eyes. The quilted mitts wiped his cheeks and came away wet. He was crying.

Behind the impassive and infinitely wise face of his companion, the fire continued to unfurl in slow motion. Naked shadows of the bodies of human beings who danced before it continued the motion of the universe initiated by the unmoved mover at the far horizon of time. The stars spun above the bodies. The moon shone impossibly bright as it pulled against the whirling grasp of the earth, revealing their own intimate dance of self-obliterating presence. Throughout all of it, the eyes of his companion reflected the multiplying spirals of existence as one undeniable truth. The eyes blinked again and revealed a deeper truth. Barnabas cried anew.

A distant part of him was aware that he had consumed a large dose of a powerful hallucinogen. He had been thirsty when he arrived at the festival. A bottle had been passed, and he had taken great swallows from it. He noticed the eyes of his new friends widen in alarm and amusement, but the beverage was refreshing and he was parched and he almost emptied it before they could tip it away from his lips.

"Easy, easy," Theodosia said.

They each took tiny swigs from what was left in the same bottle and regarded him carefully.

"He didn't know because he's not connected," said Orlandia. "We probably should have said something out loud."

"It's too late now," said Alex. "One of us needs to stay with him."

"You are about to take a powerful journey," said Zian. "Do not be afraid. We're here for you, Barney."

Barnabas hadn't understood and when they explained, he tried to vomit the liquid back out by forcing his fingers down his throat, but he couldn't manage it. His body had absorbed the fluid like a hole dug in sand. The journey had begun. These events felt like a story told to a boy at the end of a long day. The story was always the same. The ending was always inevitable. Everything that happened had to have happened. There was no point wondering why. The eyes of his companion told him that all things would always be going to happen as they did.

His companion was tall and impossibly beautiful. Barnabas didn't know her gender. She sprung from the dirt as if she was a part of it. Her hands reached down into the earth, orbiting the spinning molten core and returning up through her legs, moving the cascade of power along her rough back and long neck to her head where it escaped through the rectangular pupils of her gorgeous eyes and shot into his. Her mouth moved slowly and soundlessly. "The world is inside out," she told him.

Barnabas turned away. Something wet and fragrant hit the side of his head. One of the mitts wiped at it. The smell became a lake, filling all his senses. His body became the wet smell and the night sky turned an earthy orange. He was the smell, and the smell was everything, moving through him as he moved through it. He fell to his hands and knees on the cool earth, exhaling the river back into the core of the planet.

At once he found himself at the end of all things, looking back at the beginning. He saw the movements of the gasses of the universe and their formations. He felt the impossible luminous space between the spinning wells of gravity; he heard the sounds of life flickering in and out of existence like sparks from a bonfire. He felt the scope and scale of everything. He perceived the dance and his part in it along with all the other parts. He saw the causes of his birth and the causes of all the births that led to his. He saw the effects of all his actions and the effects of those effects. He lost track of his own consciousness, a drop of water in an ocean which was also a drop in another ocean. He was utterly obliterated for an eternity that lasted only an instant.