We Lack a Word

ANDREA'S EXPERIMENT

The young girl with the soft brown eyes and evenly flowing hair, ascended the staircase to her delicate room. The soft carpet absorbed her flow and as she easily touched and passed the railing, the first strong effects from the drug backed up into her consciousness.

She floated to the ceiling and picked up her thoughts as her mind spilled in softly undulating colors onto the thick, moving carpet from her scrambled flyaway purse and lost keys.

She tempted the handle of the soft door with her brass hand. She began peaking and had not reached the top of the stairs, had not reached the top, had not reached, nor....had.

She forgot where she was going and what she was supposed to do when she arrived.

The hours dragged on and she raced through childhood knee-high memories as she began to turn the handle. It clicked. She discovered herself seated in a strange room accompanied by discomforting thoughts.

Thoughts, ideas and places she had not seen; thoughts and ideas that were not her own.

The crowd peered at her and asked themselves who is this newcomer trespassing at this hour of the solstice?

She was moving further and further away from the known human world, from any known, human world. She was moving.

Signposts were diminishing in number. She felt very lost. Felt very alone. She remembered her friend had told her: "This will get you there!" At first she was hesitant and with a tightened throat asked if it would also get her back.

The door flew open.

Like Pandora's box the winds whined through her. Her ears hissed with the roaring of her blood. The pounding of her heart echoed and re-echoed within her breast. It was pumping a message, only she had no time to understand. So very alone in this place. So very far away from fear, from friends, from thoughts. Her mind could support no emotion. All that she knew was that she was there. However she wasn't quite sure where 'there' was.

Below her and inside the room she saw nothing. She stepped in and behind her, there was nothing. There was no door that had been there only moments before. No room existed. No bed on which to rest. No music to listen to.

It is very hard to describe the emptiness. We tend to associate something with nothing, but when there really is nothing there.... The human mind fails to correlate a lack of sense data...it ...yes... whirrs...silence...

All talk is nonsense.

Is this what the ancients had meant when they said, "There's nothing to be afraid of?"

The actual non-existence or existence of no thing bewildered her curious mind. It floated through a void. It had a sense of motion of power of curiosity. She stepped one pace further and saw a beacon of light, perhaps a symbolic vision. An illusion. A hallucination. It was nevertheless a force, a power so incredible to describe. It approached her and she saw herself die in front of herself. She had violated the order of the universe and was attempting return... hazardous conditions...no directions... no maps...no signs.

It was a sound. A light. A collection of feelings of joining the grooves of a screw that turned themselves about her arm, her wrist bled at the elbow, torn from its socket and attached to the back of her knee. Her hands and her feet were feeling the insides of her lungs and the sound of the waves was becoming thunderously deafening. The vision grew closer, became terrible and white, black and unseen. It possessed her and threw her, scowled and frowned. She was attacked from every side and tormented by heat and changes not unlike continual vomiting and defecating.

Somewhere....something told her there was an Andrea. She was very ill and that she had to be helped. It was time to come back.

Andrea was terrified, perspiring in the cold dark heat.

Had she been dreaming? No.

No dream had ever seemed so real. Even real life had never been that real. Yes, that's it. It was all an illusion. It is all delusion....of deluded minds, she laughed.

She was lying on a park bench. Dawn was just beginning to break. The clouds drifted silently away and the birds were singing songs of the earth. They sang of happiness and the joy of being alive. Small black squirrels rustled through patches of quilt-work leaves and green flowing grasses. Andrea awoke in the park.

She never knew how she came to be so many miles from her home, so many miles from that soft insidious room of darkness. She looked around, slowly gathered herself up and began to breathe in the cool morning air. Somehow the pain in her stomach had disappeared.

She walked through the park and soft tears caught themselves on her cheek, glowed red and were sniffled away. She began to cry softly as she walked over lawns that were dew and she was happy to know that she was alive.