Elixir

In a beautiful land where meadows swim in golden sunlight, you stand overlooking the valley, longing for her return. Your wretched heart aches until you think you will die, bursting into a million pieces of vacant flesh.

Little gnomes in treetops play flutes for your sorrow. They rain gumdrops from the highest boughs and you drink in the goodness of their sweetness. The sweet kisses of candy on your lips bring comfort and joy and you float into the clouds, peering down to see cows with wings and sparkly tiaras, lips painted red.

Bounce, bounce, bouncing across the puffy white clouds. Taste them, taste the light airy sweetness of the white clouds and the heavier almost leaden taste of the gray clouds.

Fall into a brown chair, cold and hard against your naked flesh, alive and polished from frolicking in the clouds, feel yourself fall backwards through the clouds, in the chair, flipping and flopping toward the earth at break-neck speeds. Your head is heavy; your eyelids are dry. A piece of your hair has adhered to your eyeball and you can’t move your hands to remove it, for they are fixed to the edges of your chair, beneath your thighs. You find yourself falling with no way to stop…but wait!

A large and invisible hammock catches you and you flop around as though on a trampoline

and you jump

and you jump

and you jump

and you fly up to the sky again – past the cows with their diamonds and ruby lips, past the sweet white clouds and the bitter gray clouds and you find yourself inside of a large white ceramic bowl, lying in a spoon the size of a bed and it is so comfortable and you are surrounded by warm, sugary liquid which is plentiful and makes you alive and young. Almost granular in texture, opaque, almost the color of a dusty pearl you drape your arm over the edge of the bowl and swirl your finger to make the sign of infinity and your toes become warm from the sugars.

Your lips are coated, dripping with the sweet juices, the nectar of youth and you see black sky and brilliant stars above but long for the comfort of the clouds, even the sad clouds. Even the thin clouds that remind you of generic cotton balls or worse – toilet paper stuffed into the toes of a woman’s dress shoe that smells sour and never loses its dampness.

You approach the edge, the circumference of your world draped in stars. The distance is great but your longing is greater and you perch yourself just over the edge and imagine that you are a puffy fat bird, bright yellow and spilling over with courage. Skinny toothpick legs scarcely look strong enough to carry your weight, you swing your legs once, twice and three times and you jump!

Your skin begins to tingle, the nectar of youth sloughing off the years of undue stress. Feathers pluck themselves out – only pleasure, only freedom, no pain. Elixir of life. Sugar. Puff. Dry. Wet and writhing and bursting with flavor and joy. You are falling and falling toward that thing you have always longed for. Will you make it?

You will never know unless you try.