Reality Transcended

Reality Transcended

My heart was beating fast. I walked swiftly, my head down. My palms started
getting all sweaty, and then itchy. I hate it when they start itching. It makes
me feel like some kind of OCD patient. I looked up; had 10 minutes passed
already? I was already at 3rd and 51st, across the street from Beckony Park. At
the apartment, the laundry hung lazily on the line from the third floor window.
Just like he said it would be. So I stood there, and just stared skyward,
scratching my palms like a crazy person.

My heart started the jumping thing: where it attempts the impossible task of
leaping out of my chest by sheer-will alone. I could hear the whispering again,
and this time, I decided not to wait and listen. It was coming; I could feel it
in my nasal cavity: which seems like an odd place to feel something so
intangible. You know how some people think they can smell a storm before it
happens? That’s the kind of feeling I get…But in my nasal cavity.

In front of the apartment was a grey post-box. I stared at it, willing it to
magically have something for me. Perhaps I did a good job. Perhaps he was just
very good at finding places to leave me things. Either way, nobody seemed to
have used this particular mail-box in years. It almost sounded like a sad sigh
as I opened it slowly, felt around on the top, and found the taped key. I
liberated it from its lonely prison and worked the tape off with my thumbnail.

Examining things intently with an attention to detail has been a trait of mine
since childhood. Ever since I became fascinated with insects and collected
butterflies. Live ones. I’ve always felt they’re the perfect example of God’s
workmanship: just look at the thin layer of powder on their beautifully
iridescent wings. I still hate butterfly collectors. I’d like to rip their arms
off and suck the blood out of them. Then pin them up on a corkboard and tell
them to enjoy it. However, staring at this key brought back something I
couldn’t quite reason. There was a very small etching resembling some kind of
coding on it. It appeared as if someone had scratched it on the key themselves.
Why, I had no idea. It looked like this: I ----i---i----I

There was something so forgettably-familiar about the etching, like something I
knew, but couldn’t grasp right away. I groped into the farther recesses of my
mind for an answer. I thought back to my instructions and went over the items.
For some reason, he stressed the park name. Then there was the post-box.
The…laundry. I looked up. I, am a genius. Wow, he really did put a lot of faith
in my intellect. Normally, I don’t have these kinds of revelations. But today,
all of a sudden, I was figuring things out left, right and centre. Like the
centre of the line, perpendicular to the ground. That had to be where it was.

He wanted to know if he was crazy. Insane. Unstable. Over-imaginative. You get
the idea. The truth is, I wanted to know too. After all, he is pretty-much my
mentor. You gotta know if the guy that’s been teaching you about life, is in
fact sane, or slightly unhinged. So here I was, after all the searching and
cryptic messages, finally about to discover what had brought my great master to
his knees in a dishevelled heap.

The clouds started forming in my mind’s eye. I knew it wasn’t anyone else’s
reality right now, only my own inane existence. So I accepted it. This time it
was going to sweep over me and be all-consuming and there’s very little one can
do at that point. I didn’t resist. I let it happen. I fell into the trance and
stepped into the deserted world.

Time slowed to a crawl. The transition was as smooth and fluid as water. As if I were trying to walk on the ocean floor. Suddenly I had a sharp intake of breath, and
fell to the ground exhausted. Walking between imaginations was taxing. Feeling
the weight of responsibility and possibilities was even more so. What did this
mean for modern science and psychology? Let alone the Philosophes: Berkeley
would actually be right, and Democritus before him, thus leaving Hume very
upset. This was all a big jumble of philosophical notions sufficated by a
Heraclitean fire. Did the major religions get it all wrong? What would happen
if word of this "situation", for lack of a better word, got out? Would people
cease to live out their own reality and constantly want to stay in someone
else’s? Would that mean we’d have a huge loss of 13 year old boys that wished
to live like Brad Pitt, (or Pamela Anderson). No one, not even Keiya, prepared
me for this. All of my questions started giving me a headache. I had to have a
lie-down. This would all be gone in the morning right? ...After a few glasses
of Jack-on-the-rocks and a smoke.