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Life Disconnected From Reality
The World is Temporarily Closed
The Verge
By Y. Hope Osborn
The black sea of stars encompassing me creases itself into a fold as “Casual Affair” by Panic at the Disco faintly fogs through the back of my mind. Below me a train trails heavy, fluffy clouds as it moves in the emphatic tempo and through a tunnel out of mind. Pa ta pa ta pa tum pa ta pa ta pa tum …. Around me two bands of rings move within and in opposition to one another like the Stargate.
The bluesy feel of “I Feel Like I’m Drowning” by Two Feet is red ink wafting through water as if from a threatened squid. I am faintly aware of the tempo in a muffled 3-beat bass drum before Imagine Dragons’ “Natural’s” vocals echo far and wide as a cavern opens to accommodate them. I wonder briefly why it is so easy to remember song and band names now when I normally draw a blank. The glowing orange sun wavers in heat waves as it enlarges on the horizon and finally engulfs me. One string then another is quietly plucked through the song’s bridge in quick succession—seconds in real time but full moments in my high. “Dust in the Wind” gusts me down through a smooth-walled square tunnel. I am always moving, hearing, then circling out ongoing from the center of the cavern I just left before I hear it.
The door clicks softly, and I am faintly aware of a presence. Many of these experiences have honed me into the moment when somebody I always assume is the regular nurse comes in. I remember that taking my blood pressure is best done sitting upright, feet to the floor, so in awkward fits and starts I pull myself up through the mud to a sitting position, opening my eyes to the dizziness of multiplicities of fluorescent and natural lights of bulb and large solid picture window. The nurse slips something heavier than a bracelet on my wrist, and somehow, eyes closed, I hold myself and my arm still until he slips it off again. I ask, “What is it?” wondering about my blood pressure, but his answer is lost as I slip back into sounds, sights, and sedation. I close my eyes against the confusion to return to organized chaos. Sometimes the light from without seeps into my visions, lighting them up, as if from a sunroof above.
Bastille’s “Doom Days” is one of my favorites, these days reminding me of current world affairs of pandemic, racism, and technological engorgement, and I try to sing along not quite hearing myself through ear buds and fog. Skyscrapers I roughly paint with orange lines remind me of “Refraction” and of my recent foray into painting. Katy Perry’s “E.T.” is red pulsing lights through a tunnel that stretches as if to a night club, “You’re .. so .. hypnotizing …”
The next song is a forgotten memory as I fly above colorful clouds hanging over a topography of hills and valleys. The name is lost, the words I sing along aren’t, though I am aware for a moment that I am not fully forming words. Then, I am back moving through a narrow tunnel as purple and yellow splash into tributaries that trail across a map.
Bastille’s “The Draw” walls me in computer boards of circuitry, but drums beat down the walls until they are flat, and I move through a tunnel that opens suddenly on water tumbling heavily far below. I stop on the verge.
Song after song a new adventure for the ear and eyes. Listening to music is life to me, but this experience is not my everyday music. It is poetry, musical instruments, color, shapes in constant motion within my head.
“Mr Blue Sky.” I hear instruments each on its own …
Clapper.
Drum.
Synthesizers.
Cymbals.
Voices.
Guitar solo.
The sun blares.
Vocal synthesizers.
Nearing the end, darkness creeps over, but for a moment, the sun fights back like a glorious sunset turning over in the twilight before the darkness overtakes it.
The music extends.
In my left ear a tinny piano seesaws between notes.
A synthesized voice is a prolonged thin high whistle. They echo sluggishly in a large cavern, reaching for me on the outer edges.
Droplets of piano keys.
“Lightning Strike” Snow Patrol. I sing out loud to myself as I have off and on throughout this ride. I think yet again how profound the line, “A memory of distant echoes.” Everything begins to sharpen as I come down from my ketamine high. A row of fiery arcs of water rise higher and higher in vocalizations and music. Thin wet streaky painting out to nothing as the song ends.
The music goes on as the ketamine slips smoothly and silently into my bloodstream. As Imagine Dragon sings in “Bullet in a Gun,” “My time has come …” I’ll be back to the experience next week, treating my depression and bringing myself to The Verge in a prescribed ketamine high.
