Getting Low on the Pecos, Getting High in Colorado

There’s a feeling of strangulation that does not make me choke. I felt it this morning. Every thought boiling in my head was negative. Negative power and my heart raced and my stomach churned and my whole body rattled with an overall feeling of exhaustion and nervousness. I feel sick the second I wake up. Drag my feet across the stained carpet of my apartment. Shuffle slow like a crippled old man with head bowed down and my vision catatonic. Hating every second of it now. Hating to breathe, to stand, to walk, to move, to sleep. Peeling my own skin off. Biting my own lip off. Chewing my nails, dabbing at tearless eyes. Screaming at the slightest mishap. A crumb falls onto the kitchen floor, and I scream! A drawer opens awkwardly, and I scream!

Don’t touch me!

Don’t talk to me!

Don’t look at me!

Don’t you dare take my picture!

I went down to the river. The mighty Pecos River that wasn’t so mighty. Maybe like me. I stood on the edge looking down at the slowly swirling brown water, the color of melted milk chocolate with maybe some blood in it. I saw my black shadow staring back at me. The ripples of the water were burning through me. I could simply fall in, but I wondered if the water would be deep enough to even come up over me. With the drought and incessant sun, all the rivers were drying up and slowly crawling now through the desert. You could see the sandbars sticking up in the middle in some places. I probably could have walked across the Pecos. Walk across like some mad magician or deity from another century. But I was too worried of the things that may live down in the water, in the sand at the bottom. Oozy, stingy things that would surprise and shock me with a pinprick of poison, or worse yet, attach themselves to me like the leeches I saw in the natural pools at Sitting Bull Falls.

Fear. So much fear and uneasiness. Scared of everything now. Scared of walking to the mailbox. Scared of unlocking my car door. Scared of staring at the sun and petrified to go to work. People will look at me when I come through the door. Stare, whisper, laugh at the fool I am. I am not normal you see. I am odd. I am Fran, Bling, Space Monkey. An alien in London. A lightning bug in New Orleans. A spirit in the sky who knows no lies other than his own shattered existence. I am Anton Chico, and I might be a lunatic.

Me, fumbling for a stick of dynamite in some far away dark away alleyway on the wrong side of this universal tide; the blue, explosive eyes running down now, running down now with an ample amount of wet tear grooves forming in the canyons of yonder young face and the tide of tornadoes and the forest lawn so brown, brown from all the pine straw littering the ground like a flagship mattress of comfort laid down for the hobos; for the animals; for me in silent, hurtful prayer; oh, the silent hurtful prayers sent up to God’s mighty throne on a bleeding arrow, I try to pierce Him in the heart with my troubles, my bitches, my complaints, my worries, my fears, my wishes, but I must have stabbed him too deep, too deep in God’s own hurtful heart that he cannot relay a message back to me down here on Earth, he is wounded, but reaching out from his hospital bed, you know they got him on a respirator up there, up there beneath the covers of angels’ dark and sinister eyes. Is there really love in Heaven or be it all a hoax for money?

I was walking through a blizzard in Colorado. Everything around me was white and I could taste the heavy flakes of snow on my tongue. Like stale water, dirty water, coated with the grime of the atmosphere before floating down so softly, so treacherous to the earth. The going was slow. The snow was so deep — at least eight inches now. My feet were soaked, but strangely warm, maybe numb as I trotted on. There’s a brown, dilapidated barn ahead. Some shelter from the wind and the cold for a bit I was hoping. The door had a chain and a lock, rusted, old, not touched for years I thought. I pulled on the door, rattled and shook it but it did not give. I did not want to hurt myself anymore. I reached into my coat pocket and withdrew the marijuana cigarette, put it between my dry-by-winter lips, retrieved my lighter from another pocket, shielded it from the wind… And then there was flame. Flame set to joint. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale. A rush of blood to the head. A rush of hollow, rubbery sensations. Time flowing all nonsense now. I was so alone in the world.

---