Aloe Vera

The first thing I could smell was what jolted me up. Beer and smoke spread through my nostrils into my lungs as my body coughed, rejecting the foul stench. I cringed, my eyes heavy as the feeling of exhaustion and sleepiness weighed down on my head and shoulders like a bag of sand, like some burden I didn't ask for but was cursed to carry. Eye boogers and the frequent blinking of my eyes in an attempt to get rid of them clouded my vision as I struggled to pull myself from the bed, feet landing on the shag carpet. With every step I could feel broken pieces of glass and dirt and dead bugs, but for the life I me I couldn't tell how they got there, or how I did. I did manage to pull myself from the bed, though. It was covered with plastic over an old mattress, and I was thankful it was. Dried vomit and an assortment of old stains decorated the urine-smelling mattress, just the stench of it alone was enough to cause me to dry-heave.

There was a draft in the room, caused by a broken window right beside the bed. I walked towards it, but I am ushered away by a startled squirrel running over the windowsill. There was a large wood outside, the ground covered with so many leaves that I wasn't even sure if there was a ground at all- my mind was amazed at how these trees could all have produced so many leaves- so many that my mind couldn't tell where the leaves stopped and the ground began, no matter how much I squinted and stared at the ground.

I turned, the door to a dark hallway was wide open. There were no lights on, looking up I could see that the lightbulb connected to the large fan above me was shattered- just like the window, the only source of light being the window. Stepping forward, toes curling against the crunch of dead bugs on my feet, I could see the hallway was a lot better than the room. It was clean, with a cold tile floor that my feet welcomed- in exchange for the mysterious, bug-and-glass-ridden brown carpet, cold tile was a step up. I let my hand drag against the side of the hallway as my eyes wandered the white walls, almost scared that if I let go I would fall down some rabbit hole and would wake up somewhere new. As I progressed down the hall, noises of people talking slowly reached my ears. It was a wake up call, in a way. I felt like I had been in some odd trance, that I had only realized I had been in now that I was out of it. I took a few steps back, carefully looking through a door in the hallway. There was a small tv, with two large antenna sticking out of the top. It was made of wood, with a curved screen, and there was a blond man holding a sword in it.
"I have the power!"
He shouted. I stepped forward, towards the strange man on the television. My feet reached a rug similar to the one in the room, without all the dead bugs and glass, yet my feet still cringed against it. Ignoring it, I sat on my knees infront of the television. The man was running with two people, saying something I couldn't quite hear properly.

Cold tears ran down my cheeks. I wasn't sure why, or what I was doing. I just sat there, watching the strange man on the TV.

Something about the disgusting house was familiar to me. The faded beige on the walls, old carpet that was littered with filth, each broken window. My mind was trying to tell me something. My eyes closed and my head strained, as I tried to push the message out of myself

I stepped up. Wiping the cold tears off of my face, I made myself walk forward, the hesitation in my legs forcing every step to feel like a marathon. There was a large, sliding glass door in the wall infront of me, already broken and open, with cold air that made me cringe in my hospital gown. I stepped outside, my feet meeting concrete, then grass.

A few steps more and I'd be stepping in brown, dried up leaves, a spider crawling up my unshaved, bare leg. My hand touched the bark of a tree, watching as an ant ran past my fingers and away from me, up towards the sky which I couldn't see.

I kept walking. Something in me told me I had to. I kept walking through the woods, for hours upon hours until I reached a, no, the clearing. Something was special about this specific clearing. My feet noticed the change from leaves to grass, prompting my eyes to refocus on what was infront of me. I had slipped into the same trance again.

The grass was cut so evenly, it made me feel as though i'd leave footprints in it as I walked towards the center. Something had caught my eye in the center of the clearing. There was a big, red balloon tied down to a weight, a card tied to its string.
"Aloe Vera-C3112. 12:13, 25/12,
38.978443, -76.492180"

I ripped the card off. I didn't know what it said, the lines on it were pretty. There was no where to put it, so I stuck it under my arm and picked up the balloon. I kept on forwards.