He reclined with naturally graceful poise upon the springy sofa and watched memories being made. Surrounding him, circling him as if gravitationally pulled into his orbit, were lovers – both old and new – dear friends, whose counsel he cherished liked a family heirloom, and perfect strangers to whom he now felt tethered, like stranded sailors on a desert island, whose fates were now somewhat miraculously and unexpectedly intertwined. What future lay upon the horizon, for he and his new fellows, he knew not with any semblance of surety. Would the universe open up new dreamlike realms of wonder and ecstasy, or would they find themselves engulfed in a tempest of horror and woe? Such thoughts never once danced across his mind, like a meteorite shower in the night sky, for he was – in that ephemeral fleeting moment – entirely consumed by the profound bubble of experience that seemed to bloom elegantly into existence, like a sublime rose flower from a once dark and hardened bulb. Psychoactive powders tingled the tips of his nostrils, like a dusting of fresh snow in a wintery meadow of exquisite beauty. Champagne corks were strewn about the room and crystal glasses clinked in a lush symphony of sound. Aristocracy had finally met modernity in a coalescing fusion of holy madness and plush bourgeois aesthetics. As if he had inextricably and coincidentally stumbled upon a nudist colony, dancing figures flung designer clothing into red-lit corners, over bass-thumping subwoofers, on ornate mantlepieces and into fragrant maple-wood drawers and wardrobes, with little to no regard for the worries of the world, focussed only – in their intoxicated psyches – upon the enticing yet hollow pursuit of sensual pleasure. Whether this was a new beginning, or a farewell finale, he could not decipher – like a clandestine code – nor deduce – like a puzzling and infuriating riddle the mystery of which haunted even ingenious minds. The sharpness of his senses diluted by waves of inebriation, he cared not. He was finally liberated from the rusty chains of confusion and anxiety by which he had come to be shackled for many wearisome months of mental anguish and psychological torment.
He looked out upon life with amazement and excitement; as if he were a gleeful child at the circus, as if all the world were seen through stain-glass rose-tinted windows, as if the doors of perception were adorned with glittering gold and finely encrusted with dazzling diamonds. Such was the psychedelic nature of his mind, it’s neurochemistry altered by laboratory chemicals which in ancient times would have been viewed as shamanic potions or, in the future, extra-terrestrial virtual-reality goggles. His usually shaggy hair quaffed and quiffed with finesse into a spherical shape closely resembling a wave; one which could be casually surfed right to the white sand shorelines of his skull, the ivory-coloured bony castle in which his current state of euphoria fizzed and bubbled, like a witches elixir or a wizards brew. There was no rhyme or reason to the rhythms of his thoughts nor the fluid dancing clouds of feeling that ebbed and flowed within his usually heavy heart, which now felt as light as a dove’s feather floating in a gentle summer breeze down a river of lily pads and statuesque cranes perching in a regal pose in the shallow waters by the fertile bank. Latching erotically and somewhat tenderly onto both his arms were an exotic, sun-tanned model of ambiguous ethnic descent and a fairytale-esque princess with pearl white skin and pristine minty teeth to match. Both were romantically drawn to him like a bee to a technicolour flower, a moth to incandescent lamplight, or a butterfly to the moist black nose of a golden retriever puppy snoozing in the magical garden of a Lord and Lady’s grand countryside estate, to which only a select strata of high society were blessed with formal invitation. His troubled youth and the scars of childhood trauma which, in times of disquieting unease and silent suffering, seemed too close to bear, like a ruthless gorilla in a wild forest or a charging rhino in the vast plains of Africa bearing down upon its feeble enemy with humungous ferocity and speed, now felt as if they were countless billion lightyears away, far far away on the other side of an inconceivably-infinite universe. He felt like a paper kite flying way up in the blue cloudless skies of an idyllic park, as giddy children with innocent, unscathed souls pranced merrily across the soft green grasslands with a youthful exuberance the loss of which haunted most adults.
He giggled with great gusto and chuckled haughtily, like a caged bird sings songs of freedom upon its liberation from the iron bars of a medieval zoo. Despite this, a ghostly feeling of remorse began to seep through the cracks of the psychedelic mirage within which he floated, like a lonesome log in a salty sea, an oceanic wilderness of both solace and solitude. He knew, deep down in the cavernous trenches of his mind, that this beautiful illusion could not be sustained. Eventually the bubble would burst and his flailing limbs would splat upon the unforgiving concrete of serotonin and dopamine depletion. Still he yearned to float higher, to feel greater depths of pleasure, to bask ever longer in complacent joy. To him it was a great tragedy of ancient Greek equivalence; that eventually every song must end, that every winding tale must climax, that every memory must fade, that every love story must culminate, that every mortal being must perish and dissolve back into the endless abyss from which it was mystically born, that every child must grow old, that every film must cease, that every colour in a heavenly impressionistic painting must slowly lose its saturation until it is nothing more than a wraithlike shadow of its previous form, a monochromatic tombstone of contours and shapes, that every tear must evaporate, that every moment must pass, that every mood must dissipate, that every high must fizzle, that every flame must be extinguished, that every man made monument must fall, that the end credits to life must one day be illuminated in the black of night, that the climactic high C of an angelic soprano must soon crumble into silence, that every wave must crash, that every fantasy must burst back to reality, that inescapable eternity of darkness which eventually must envelop all that exists in an icy crypt of infinite nothingness.
Short Story by Stamos Mardou