9:03 p.m. - 2001-07-06
eternal
If I hadn't woken up tangled in the sheets, my pillow tight around my head and my clothes tangled in the sheets like every morning, I wouldn't have known I was dreaming. It had started out almost like a road into darkness, driving a heavy blue car nothing like my flimsy Tracker. Two guys and a girl I didn't know were dead stoned in the backseat; another girl was up front with me, detailing the landscape that we were missing by breathing in the air we were breathing. "Breathe sideways," she kept saying, "breathe sideways." She was flickering transparent solid transparent solid as her chest rose and fell with each breath. She sighed and leaned back. Her white-blond baby-fine hair drifted over the back of the seat, and her face flickered again. "Breathe. Sideways."

I did as she asked, pulling the air in from somewhere that definitely was not my lungs. I'd say my jugular, but I'm not quite sure. We flickered together, held hands, faintly below us we felt the smoke from the backseat joint drift up and through our feet.

Immediately, I slept. These lilac clouds I found myself sinking through were not unlike forever, and my mind was on eternal. Clothes were seeming like a ridiculuous idea; the clouds did not wear clothes, the sun did not wear clothes, these birds did not wear clothes, so why was I sleeping on this pure, untouched cloud swathed in denim? I let them fall. My mind was filled with voices from the earth we'd left. The car's crashing noises, the laughter of the wasted, the wail of a newborn baby. I turned to look at the girl, who had, somehow, become part of the cloud, and looked at my feet, becoming steam themselves, and realized my face was liquefying. Before my lungs could collapse into a silvery gas, like everything around me, I took a deep breath.. sideways.

Back immersed in the familiar smell of pot, the blue car smashed through a guardrail and tumbled downward. Unending. Eternal.

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