Wonderland (1)

5:35 AM--Saturday

I sit on the hood of the car, my Hello Kitty sunglasses pulled down tightly over my eyes, waiting for the line of cars we are trapped in to inch forward. “Why didn’t I bring anything to drink?” I wonder dully, my inner voice sounding stupid and spaced out even to me. “Oh shit, I’m supposed to be driving,” I remember. We’ve been trying to leave for nearly 45 minutes and have thus far made no progress. Inside my tiny Civic, my roommates doze lightly, stirring every now again to check our nonexistent progress. I’m tired myself, but I can’t sit still. Bass is still creeping under my skin, making me jitter and sway though there is no music playing other than the damp, nonsensical pounding of other people’s stereo systems.    

The sun has just begun to peek its head over the horizon and yet it is already oppressively hot. Sweat is clinging to my body like a second skin and I can feel my hair stick to my damp forehead as I sway my head back and forth to the Dash Berlin song playing in the car behind us. Molly is still with me, infecting my soul with the need to dance and making every note of every song special, beautiful and colorful to my ears. Lasers and lights float in the place where my brain used to reside, even as the harsh reality of the dawn beats down on me. Though I’m more and more aware of my general raggedness with each passing second--Who the fuck ripped my tights? Where the Hell did my left shoe go?--I can’t give any less fucks about the way I look.The world is sparkling and full of magic and good vibes. Is war even still a thing?

It’s all I can do to hold on to this feeling, but I know it won’t last much longer. Already I can feel the aches and pains of the night throbbing in my limbs and I know that soon I will be back on the ground. I examine my left foot, which had recently (?) broken through my favorite pair of black tights. Through the thick layer of dirt and unknowable stickiness I can see that, aside from having severely chipped my toenail polish, the arch of my foot is slightly purpled. Gingerly, I press my finger to it and feel the tiniest, sharpest, searing jolt of pain. Silently, I mourn the fact that I am only starting to be aware of the damage I did to my body; and that I drive a manual car.

Suddenly the sun has risen and the cars in front of me are creeping forward. Artlessly, I slide off the hood of my car and spastically hobble/dance back into the driver’s seat. I buckle myself in--safety first, after all--and glance back at the remaining passengers in my car. My two roommates are asleep outright now, their heads pressed against the tiny back seat windows. Our other passenger never came back to the car and presently I cannot fathom any insidious reason why she wouldn’t have. “Probably just made some new friends,” I decide as our car merges with the others in the steady line of traffic leading to I-15 South.  

We glide along, my Civic moving soundlessly across the slate gray pavement of the freeway. The soft breathing of my journey-mates coupled with the heavy silence is really bumming me out, so I turn on one of the CD’s we made for the drive out to The Speedway from the California coast. The melodic, dreamy music seeps out of my speakers and flows into my body through my ears and nests down in my heart. The sensory fluid in my inner ear is set on overdrive, burning like the desert sand all around me, and every heartrending note is more perfect than the last.The surreal voice pouring from my speakers may as well be the secret voice of my soul, whispering all those little truths about the world and myself that I always chose to overlook. It hypnotizes me and commands me to get lost with it.

My mouth moves and my voice comes dripping out of it, saccharine and clumsy compared to the one dazzling me from the CD (or was it coming from within me?). I have no conscious control over my mouth. I simply have to sing. If I don’t sing, I don’t know what will happen. Will the music stop? No, no, no; the music can’t stop, so I don’t stop singing. It is somewhere between my nervous singing, awkward car dancing, and agonized left foot that it occurs to me that perhaps I should not be operating a car.  

The CD spins on and on, getting scanned by a laser, translated to sound in my speakers, and transformed to magic in my ears, and somehow we materialize back at our hotel. We stumble through the lobby as gracefully as extras from “The Walking Dead”--myself especially since I am now limping on different length legs. Oddly, it never occurred to me to remove my other shoe. As we draw the stares of people who have already been to bed today, I remember that we are oddly dressed by regular standards. Some of those fucks I didn’t give two hours ago have found me and I am suddenly and horrifically aware of the fact that I am currently wearing one rainbow sock and a tutu.  

My head is a tangled zone of unfocused thoughts and the haze of lights, floating somewhere above my body like one of those oversized Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons. It’s all I can do to keep walking forward, shuffling onward like I’m looking for brains. Finally we arrive back in our room. The friend we misplaced is sitting on the floor combing her hair out, surprised to see that we are getting back after her, but not that we had left without her.

Fearfully, I examine myself in the full-length mirror outside our make-up strewn bathroom. I sigh, relieved to see that aside from my shoelessness, missing sock, and slightly unkempt hair, I more or less look like a human being. I hobble back to my shared bed, too exhausted to change into more sensible clothing. I pull my tutu and remaining sock off and fall face forward onto my bed. I remove my kandi with the carefulness and precision of a category five hurricane. Some time during this hasty storm of bead chucking I realize my hair has become wrapped around my kandi necklace. I fiddle with it half-assedly, mumbling to anyone, but largely no one for help and a pair of scissors. Finally I give up and rip it out of the knotted, sweaty mess that is my hair, breaking a clump of my curls off with it.

I lie face down for some time, fighting the urge to move and rub my teeth together. I feel as though I have physically aged about 30 years in 20 minutes. I roll my shoulders and I can feel all the muscles in my arms tighten and pull on my overtaxed joints. I creak and pop like an old wooden ship that has seen too many storms as I bounce my protesting legs in a spazzy sort of mock dancing kind of way. Yet, as tired and drained as my body is, my brain, finally finding its way back into my head, is still hurtling through the galaxy at maximum warp. I lie still for hours while my consciousness skips through meadows and ponders the difficulties of keeping pets in zero gravity. At long last my eyelids begin to blink closed and I feel myself grow lighter and lighter. I turn my head slightly and glance at the time on the alarm clock. It’s 9:34 AM.

“What could possibly be worth this?”, I wonder as I begin to drift off to sleep. I chuckle as the memories of the night rush back into me, remembering that everything was worth this.

Let’s rewind a little....
3:30 PM Thursday  

A kaleidoscope of sand and heat shifts before my eyes as we slide forward on the I-15 north. Bronzen earth coalesces with the blanched white surface sands as the desert wind swirls them about its parched fingers. I am distantly aware of the chatter of my friends, but the golden shimmer of the sun on the scorched skin of the earth is too distracting to care much about what is being said around me. I’ve never been a huge fan of the desert, largely because I handle the heat as well as I handle responsibility; but to deny the magic in beholding the sheer power nature has to shape the world into such a stark wonderland is an impossibility. At least I think so, but when have I ever denied anything?

“I want to fire a machine gun with topless ladies!” Cande exclaimed, her thunderous voice shaking me from my quiet thoughts. She practically had her nose pressed to the window as we passed the billboard. She sloshed her drink down the front of her shirt as she jumped in her seat to better see it as we sailed by. Her russet skin baked in the Nevada sun, trapped in the cramped back seat of my compact car and yet she was still full of energy, ready to hit the sands running the moment the engine was silenced. Not even cranberry drenched clothing could dampen her spirits.  

“Oh my God, Cande,”  sighed Lilly, a quiet smile playing in her voice as Cande’s infectious happiness spread to the rest of us in the car. “We’re already stopping at the dinosaur park on the way back home for you. You can calm your obsession with tits for four days for the rest of us.”

“Yeah, Cande,” Emma chimes, “calm your tits.”

A shove fight erupts between them, though there is as much aggression and malintent in the act as one would find in a puddle of corgi puppies. Their laughter and profanity is the soundtrack of the remainder of our drive into golden nothingness, their jovial voices ringing out in praise of sin as the cathedral of Las Vegas rises on the horizon. I gaze out the passenger side window as hills of dirt and dryness take shape around us, mumbling a joke about bat country to myself as our pilgrimage reaches it end. I close my sleep weary eyes and inhale.Their voices absorb into my bloodstream like oxygen, feeding the flame in my soul. I light a candle and lift a wordless prayer to Hunter Thompson, my Santo Niño de Atocha, for surely he was watching over me to make tripping in a confined space for eight hours such a pleasant and beautifully weird experience.  

The cotton candy sky has melted back to its normal, boring blue by the time we pass the first shabby little motel. Reality is always such a dull, washed out place after a good trip; but really, when have I ever not found that inevitable grey embrace downright exhausting compared to the gilded universe in my mind? Even before all this excessive and wasteful living, back when all I cared about was Pokemon cards and coloring books, I was off in my own little world. I lived in a kingdom of paper, hidden safely away from everything in the pages of my books. Not much has changed since I was a kid, but the paper that sets me free is much smaller and the stories are written in a very different sort of ink.  

“Oh my god, you guys!” Cande squeaks, her arms flailing out as if she were simultaneously trying to tap all of us on the shoulder. “I can see our hotel!”

Sure enough, just on the horizon a giant, black pyramid is glimmering in the afternoon sun.