You wish this were a dream, but that would be giving too much credit to your creativity. You color inside the lines. You jump without asking how high. You fit in boxes, not spectrums. In dreams, everyone that makes a guest appearance is someone you have been subliminally exposed to. There are characters in your dream, shifting perspectives, unclear plotlines melding into each other like an orgy in lava. Here, your mind’s eye sees nothing but yourself, and not the one from mirrors and front-facing cameras and photographs, but truly-unruly your self. This is a reality you can’t snort.
You don’t like swearing, it reminds you of your father, but shit, what the motherfucking ball-licking clitoris-in-a-jar Lewis Carrol-Freudian-Rod Serling-ass diarrhea-ass cunt-fingering goddamn hell is this? Every time you look down at your hands, there’s a new injury glitched in. Your pinkies are gnawed off. Your wrists are ash-blackened stubs. Your fingers are snapped backwards. Your skin is peeled off. Your palms are pierced infinitely with needles. Your ring fingers are melted off. Your knuckles are slashed to shreds. And yet, through all these mutilations, you can feel a smooth, warm, invisible tongue wrapping around your fingers (when you have them). It’s a human tongue.
You tread through the squishy landscape. “Squishy” is an understatement. What you’re stepping through are snow-white hearts, though not the ones of the Valentine’s Day card variety. They are scaffoldings of the organ, with all the cells extracted from them, made from the extracellular matrix—collagenous connective tissue. It was like Black Friday in the black market. The organs are squishy, yes, but what disgusts you the most is how firm they are. How they bounce back like memory foam after every trepid step of your now-least favorite pair of gray sneakers. You want to vomit, badly, but your stomach isn’t imagined in this dimension-universe-timeline-alternate reality. So, mystery fluid splashes and congeals onto the hem of your jeans and your body is unable to rebel against itself in disgust.
You try not to look at your hands. Or your feet. Or the flickering image of yourself in your mind’s eye like a movie projection. Creativity is not your strong point, but dang it if you aren’t determined. You haven’t been this desensitized since you became an adrenochrome junkie. You look forward, towards your dumbass boyfriend, saturated in so much lavender oil you can already smell it. He has his back turned to you, wearing his signature baby blue button-up and white shorts. He’s writing in pink on a chalkboard. You ignore the flying corpse of a deer slashed open, raining its bloody guts and teeth over you.
“You idiot!” you yell, but your own voice is amplified tenfold as if you’re shouting into your own ears. You’re surprised he hears you over the rising shepard tone in this nightmare fuck of a place, but he must be accustomed to it. You try to shield your ears from that awful screech of your voice (crap, you ask yourself if that’s what your voice actually sounds like because it’s ugly as heck), but you feel that human tongue slithering from your thumb into your ear holes and you decide you’d rather go deaf.
He turns around. He speaks in a whisper, but it rings as loud as regular volume in the reality you’re used to. “Oh. Hey! You made it!” he says, as if this was some boring dinner party thrown to impress his jerk boss. He doesn’t look happy to see you, because he’s never happy to be interrupted from his life’s work, but he fakes it just for you. You hate that. You’re not a distraction, you’re the entire freakin’ show. “Uh. How’d you get here, exactly?”
“That should be my question.”