As the rush comes

15 minutes.

It is 15 minutes before I realize that my world is horizontal, that the cold I am feeling is from my marble floor and not from the snow, rain or rogue endothermic demon. It is a persistent cold, an organic and living sensation that reaches into your core and holds on.

I try to reach my fingers, but my brain is too tired to send a nerve impulse that far, and instead I reach my heart, its beating is hypnotic. I feel every muscle contracting and every nerve reacting. The heart, magnified, feels like a construct of old stones and gravel that moves and settles into different patterns with every beat. The beat itself is no longer one sound but almost an orchestra of melodic chaos, like a murder of crows screaming into an empty street through a megaphone.

“WAKE UP!”

Someone screams, the sound cancels out all others, and I remember having a purpose. I reach out and find my fingers, and from there I find my toes. The cold has gotten stronger while I was focused on my heart, it crept up from my physical into my mental, the cold threatened to engulf my mind, leaving it as frozen as my body felt.

‘WAKE UP!”

Was it another scream, or was this an echo of the first? It felt hollow and lifeless, the sound of a mannequin falling apart in an empty room. But it helped, my nerves scream in unison to generate anger, energy and little lightning storms in my joints and bones. Strength returns to my mind, and like magma flowing down a cliff it generates heat to push back the cold.

I find that I have to focus on my movements, as if my body had reset itself and lost all memory of movement.

I make mental check-list of all my limbs, muscles and joints. I imagine gears fitting together and little men pulling levers to start hydraulic pumps and turning wheels to allow blood back into the forgotten reaches of me. A veteran worker sits at the control panel near my heart shouting out orders through a PA system and pushing buttons to allocate energy, he stares sadly at the snapshot of his family he keeps tacked on his console, and swears to spend more time with them if he survives this.

My body comes to life, and now I need to get up.
Elbows lock and push downwards, ankles provide traction and force. Abdomen and neck tense up and contract. And all at once,like a behemoth rising from slumber at the bottom of a black ocean I ascend. Time, or at least my perception of it, slows to a crawl, and I feel a phantom alpine wind blowing wildly against me, causing a whooshing torrent of sounds. My joints ache and groaned like a corpse. Pain had never felt so real and vivid. The pain translates into a visible colour,it is a cross between brown and purple and it fills the room inside my eyes. The colour intensifies and shifts as I struggle to rise to my feet.

“WAKE UP!”

This time it staggers me, the sound hits me like a tangible shock wave and I am thrown back into myself, and I think a bit past myself. My eyes feel like they were 10 inches above my head and my mouth tastes like my hair. But I am standing, a retarded version of it, but I am on my hind legs, though all sense of anything is beyond me.
But I have a feeling. A feeling of everything within me reorienting to a new(or old?) world view. Blood,snot, semen and slime flows back into their appropriate places, now that a natural direction of gravity is restored.

15 seconds
15 seconds passed before I realized I was still standing. My knees have locked themselves into position, and my mind forgot to stop rising when my body did. The air seems to have a body of its own that caresses me and keeps me afloat by teasing me with opaque disembodied hands straight out of a Disney cartoon. In the distance there was a something that felt like music but sounded like food.

“WAKE UP!”

I was awake,I wanted to scream back,but my throat had forgotten what it sounds like. Ashamed, it remains silent. I fumble around me with what I think is my hand and I find something soft. I dread my decision but it has to be done. I willed the gravity of my soul to return,and I come crashing down back into my body. I use the momentum and lower my body into the sofa.

I finally open my eyes, and, unrepentantly, I reach for the bong.