surface tension

Left the library at 3:06 P.M.  Head is swimming.  Breathe tastes of Gatorade, Red Bull, gingivitis, and cigarettes. Stomach is swishing with a potent Molotov cocktail of energy drinks.  Muscles feel flabby and pathetically weak.  Feel nauseas.  Light up a cig at once as I slink into the car.  Smoke absent-mindedly on the ride home thinking about the jumbled kaleidoscope of pictures which has somehow lead to this night.  Driving down a hill, I receive at once the real and at once insane vision that a large deer carcass is huddled in the middle of the road.  My over-cooked brain quickly asks itself “Is that really a fucking deer? no? good god that was a close one – sweet Jesus, it’s okay, I’m just crazy.”  I still swerve out of the way just in case.

Getting safely to my room without any more uncontrollable and feverish Indian visions, I lay down.  Still could puke.  Outside, the noise which assails my racked body is that of a sickly neighbors drain fighting hours of cloggage; a noisy tractor-beam from a ‘Close Encounters’ type alien abduction or … a fucking owl. I tell myself not to rule out the possibility of any one of the three.  This night, full of intriguing and unruly ups, and ups, and ups, and downs, and ups, and ups, and ups, and downs, and ups (etc.) – sure has seen its share of untimely and completely far-fetched developments.

Take for instance what happened to me only thirty-odd minutes ago, sitting alone in a usually inaccessible classroom in the library.  Typing up a paper that is neither in my voice, nor for any one of my classes, and yet, in the midst of a grave understanding that there is the very real and very serious possibility that I will be caught, broken, convicted of plagiarism, and expelled; I have the intense, momentary, out-of-body experience that someone is, and has been, closely watching me.  I mean really watching me – and not with the intentions of checking to see if they could be some assistance pertaining to the works on or relating to Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  No, this on-looker wouldn’t care if my name was Charlotte or Gilman.  My mind was assured he could work with either.

So my head recklessly becomes locked in a one-track swivel, whirling around without any hesitation or guile towards the small, square glass window on the door.  And by god, sure enough, a face not only is framed in cold, nightmarish reality by the square window – but going so far as to justify my sensory perceptions, is also engaged in the activity of staring straight back at me.  I’m on so many uppers at this point in the night that it goes without saying my heart skips ten beats in quick procession – making me legitimately dead in most states for a millisecond.

And just to clarify, the face which stared back into my own was a face that would surprise you at midday, sun shining, surrounded by a safe buffer-zone and healthy separation of people –with at least one cop standing nearby.  It was a face that knew that surprising and smiling at the same time is probably a bad idea and in doing so could only strike fear into the heart of that certain particular unknowing person – no matter how innocent or comical its intentions were.  I was trapped and scared shitless.