In the Lion's Teeth: Second Edition

Chapter Six

This time, it takes less than a half hour. Your pupils dilate, your pulse picks up and so does your breath. Where all the psychiatric meds in the world were useless, less than a half hour and sixty milligrams of MDMA are all you need to conquer the fucking world.

This time you know exactly how you'll respond, and you're going to go out and experience the world for what it's supposed to be.

You grab your tape recorder and slide it into your jacket pocket after you pull it on. Mitch is still asleep, but then, he's always been late to bed and late to wake. Gloves and beanie and scarf and oh, the soft angora of the scarf slipping against your neck and the warm, almost silkiness of the alpaca wool gloves sliding against your palms is almost enough to make you melt. For a few minutes, you just gently touch your own face, eyes closed, so relaxed even as your heart beats double time. For a few minutes, you just breathe and exist.

Driving is probably a bad idea, because no matter how you may try to explain it, you are intoxicated, and you're so easily distracted. You may have just made a very poor decision, but you're not about to make a dangerous one on top of it.

The cold air is different when you go outside this time. It's crisp and clean and the cold kisses your nose and cheeks in soft, playful nips. The snow is so white, so clean, and when you bend over to scoop up a handful it's so soft and fluffy that it takes every ounce of self-control in you to not just collapse into it and hug it close.

A tiny white speck on your black sleeve catches your eye, and for the first time in your three winters here, you pause to really look, and it's so delicate and tiny and intricate, lacy patterns that so easily melt and shatter. You'd thought that you could only see the patterns in snowflakes under a microscope, but it's right here in front of you, on you, touching you, letting you hold it, and you're almost afraid to move for fear of destroying it. So instead, you just watch, eyes wide, taking in the bright, bright white as it slowly melts against the warmth of your sleeve.

It could be minutes or it could be hours when you stand back up, and when you do, you keep going, your head falling back and eyes catching the myriad shapes of the bare, black and brown branches above you, stretching and reaching for each other, trying to get closer, to connect, and it's so beautiful. You never realized how much even trees love each other. There's so much love, everywhere, and you don't know how you didn't notice it until now. It's all-encompassing.

You haven't even made it past the school grounds yet and you've already seen more beauty here than the rest of your life combined. A slow, ecstatic smile slowly crawls out all the way from the deepest recesses of your heart, through your blood and skin and out to your lips, a full body joy that almost leaves you shaking. The white fairy lights that they put up over the holidays are still curled around the trunks and branches, and even though it's light out, they still blink and twinkle like tiny stars close enough to reach, and you do, you gently cup one of the bulbs with your first two fingers, and it's warm and bright and beautiful, everything is so, so beautiful.

You've done some religious reading in your mandatory humanities courses, you've read about things like this, but you never thought it could be real, but it is, the most real anything has ever been. Pure ecstatic joy, in the original, religious sense of the word, like communing with the Gods or witnessing a miracle, or even having a miracle performed on you, yourself. The soul you didn't even realize exists is awake now, and it's everywhere, and you don't even know where you end and the rest of the world begins anymore because everything is connected so deeply, and it's perfect.

Your phone goes off in your pocket, a cheerful doorbell chime, and you grin even brighter. How did you not realize how nice that sound is until now? You unlock your phone, about to open your text messages, but the background — the same gradient blue it was when you bought it three years ago, never changed because you never bothered — is so pretty, the way the shades slowly fade into each other, so completely, so seamlessly, just like the universe. For at least five minutes, you just stare at it, until your text icon jumps and reminds you to check it. It's Mitch.