23- Fanning The Edge At Mach 5

            I was startled. There it was. Change. Point blank change. I stared harder. And the light drew closer. The skin around my eyes was burning up, and I took another hit of cheap vodka. But I never broke my gaze.

Closer the light came and around it a flutter illuminated brilliance circling it like a nexus. Entwined rings of yellow and gold, and moving closer to me as I kept my eyes open. My heart racing. This “change” now moving closer as it’s aura became not dimmer, but tighter and more precise until it was about two inches from my face, just outside the reach of my nose, in perfect view.

Then it touched me. I dropped the bottle of Vodka as it landed on the tip of my nose. A pressure on my skin, I winced as if expecting it to be hot. But it wasn’t. It was cold. Not like ice, but like air, a light cold pin prick of cold air.  Air, like the kind the optometrist blows into your eye upon examination.  And it sat there for a moment until it’s illumination became dimmer, until it’s light became a collected even aura, a glow within a shell. Glinting outward, from within, like bio-luminescence. And as the light gave way, I focused my gaze hard, but blurry, staring at the tip of my nose, trying to make out the body within the light. Trying to find detail- to give detail to this…this bug. That’s all I could think of. Like a firefly, on the tip of my nose, just out of reach of my sight, blurred by my eyes struggling to see my face and the tip of my nose. I felt my arms and legs fill with radiating “pins-and-needles” and I couldn’t move. Not out of fear, but out of control. Control by the touch of this… blurry little bug.

The cigarette dangling from my mouth met the bottle of Vodka at the base of my feet. And that pins-and-needles tingling sensation became stronger, as if electrifying me, and the smell, the smell was pungent, like o-zone, like the smell of a room filled with electronics, like a Radioshack in a strip mall.

Paralyzed, I was paralyzed. There was no struggling though this, there was no will of motion. It was complete and utter frozen lack of self-control searing through my little body, and the more I thought about moving my arms or legs, the harder it became. Until thoughts simply emptied out of my mind in exact completeness, as if de-fragging my motor-skill set one by one. Until, I was neatly organized as nothing but a blank.

My mind was total placid calm. I was a file cabinet, organized neatly, thoughtless blank page by blank page. I was an unrecorded VHS tape. I was clean muslin stretched and unframed, I was undeveloped Polaroid film, I was unburned and sterile and circular and glinting fresh out of the spindle. Blank and waiting to receive information.

But I could hear my heart beat, I could feel the gear switch, the panic gear set in, fast hard beats; invigorating full fast beats. Strong thumps of reassurance as I stood frozen with my eyes crossed down to my nose.

It was small, ladybug in size, and it just sat there, as if returning my stare. It didn’t move.

And then it happened.

It made connection.

It was information pushing in to my mind with a rush of symbols and lines, and diagrams and numbers on pages whirring past as if you’d depressed your thumb across the bottom edge of a hand drawn flip-book and whipped every image past me fanning the edge at Mach 5. The rush was intense and jarring, as if you’d hit your funny bone, except that ping of sensation was in my mind potent and true.  A “Cortext-ual” tuned fork, sharing the vibration of my mind- encoding me. This thing was filling my thoughts in a way that a sponge takes on water, instant after squeeze and engorged.

White lines on blue paper.

It was knowledge fast and locked into my mind in huge amounts, some understood, some not, but it was there, and it was very real, and it was happening to me- A kid, some little shithead punk fucking kid who steals his dead-beat whore mother’s cigarettes and Vodka, and knows exactly jack shit, about absolutely nothing.

Until now, as one end of the memories dip to black and fade down, the beginning of the memories circle back up again in to a clarifying light..

And the trace to the start is revealed, as the tail of the tale winds back around, and the importance of anything unknown in any puzzle always beckons a beginning- it's white lines on blue paper and an understanding of what it all means.

And as my senses came back, and that little bug of light was gone. I felt full, but dreading the walk home, to my dirty mother and the apartment, and that VCR and Kevin. And I shut myself off. I picked up the bottle, took the last swig of Vodka that circled the indented edge inside the base of the bottle, a fast swig, a wake up shot, and a quick light of a smoke. And I walked in to the dark. Each step I took, was farther in to the process of shutting down, each step, I was more and more distant from that little bug of light until I was at my doorstep. And I stood there for a moment. Until I had a galvanized forget-fullness all of the whole night. I opened the door and there was my mother on the couch, sitting half naked, stoned and bleary eyed and angry.

"Did you steal my fucking bottle of Vodka...and my last pack of cigarettes you little shit?"

She didn't ask where I was, or how I was doing...too stoned to care, too stoned to notice I smelled like Vodka and cigarettes she was looking for.

"Well do you know where they fuck they are?" she said, turning her hand down to her crotch and scratching, waiting for me to reply.

"I forgot," I said, as I walked away.