Exercise #5 An environment she doesn't understand

Tonight as the acid hit, I focused on the small grains of the sidewalk and felt my appendages rising. It wasn’t until I looked up that I realized he was trying to hoist me up to my feet. The acid didn’t seem to hit him. He was right in my face,
telling me to stop rolling around on the grass and getting myself all green and wet. I guess it had rained earlier, but I didn’t care about my clothes, or the grass stains. He was also telling me to stop yelling in his ear. I saw my veins breaking open, and red puddles appearing and disappearing like silent amoebas on the palms of my hands, on the ground, and felt the cold wetness on my face. I thought I was bleeding to death. He got me into the car and drove around the neighborhood to calm me down, but the turns of the vehicle made me nauseous, so I had to get out, only to end up on the ground again. I told him that I needed to go home, that I needed to get my journals. He asked me why I needed to write at this moment, what the hell was wrong with me, but he told me I wouldn’t be alone. He’d listen if I needed to talk. So I tripped up the stairs, and breathing harshly, located my journals under my bed. The yellow lights of the hallway cast a treacherous hue throughout the house, but I ignored it and trampled down the stairs outside to my audience.
Some time during the morning hours, as the high retreated back into my body and settled indefinitely in my spine, I recalled past sunrises and moments of clarity and reiterated them to him. I wasn’t able to stop talking; the words I spat out to him seemed to overwhelm him, and he criticized me for acting stupid when I was smart. He told me I probably was stupid, practicing so many years to be so.
I realized that the person having a high has their own choice to make of what kind of high, but I’ve always been too uptight to really enjoy myself. It was a nine-hour bad high. I’m still drenched with it by sound and smell. It hurts…all I know is that the high took all my fears by the throat and used them to torment me. I had to continuously shake to make my presence known to myself and who I was talking to, or else my mind would float off, and I was afraid to find out where. I knew some sort of death lay beyond the thin cape of now. So I pulled at my hair, beat my legs on the ground, bit my hands-anything to remind myself I was still a solid substance. Was I still alive and somehow beating inside? I saw veins and arteries run their large gaping, open rivers on the palms of my hands. My nails looked deathly gray, except for the tips, which were deathly white. There was something very wrong with my hands. I ran my dry tongue over them until I learned to see like a blind person, knowing with my tongue that I was still me, the same, and that my hands were still there, and it was my eyes who were betraying me. I started choking and fighting against my own vomit, and for awhile, I thought I’d given up the fight to breathe. Breathing either became erratically fast, or almost nonexistent. I had to kick my legs out in every direction, because the thing was, I couldn’t stop moving. I was so afraid of becoming immobile, because the word itself held a more frightening definition than the one I had known before these hours. I kept counting the seconds from the time I had pigged out before the high had really set in. As I threw up thoroughly on the living room floor, I thought of this miserable high-all this puke-gallons and gallons of it, all for that tiny square of nonchalant paper. It never warned me it would make me feel this way. The plants in the living room became some mutant form-they were waving and dancing towards me. I lay down next to them, and tried to become inanimate, so that they’d leave me alone. I had become immobile, and they had become animal. As I lay there, I started remembering that discovery of that sacred line-the one between man and everything man wondered about. I remembered finding these answers and wondering why it was so easy to know, but not remember enough to tell later on. Maybe our minds were programmed to forget at the crucial moment of becoming sober. I forgot about my discovery, and felt that it wasn’t so phenomenal after all. It wasn’t hard to accept the fact that my mind had forgotten, and that no one would share my certainty of the other worlds. The acid on my tongue dissolved itself until it became a permanent part of me.