Clever Reflections

SEVEN- Salem

This place was fucked up. Admittedly, I thought a great many things were fucked up. Case in point: social structure, selfish superiority complexes, high health teachers, voices in your head... But with the addition of endless bathrooms and now this place (places?), the scale did not simply tip. It broke. It blew the fuck up.

Speaking of the endless bathroom, I had kept my shit together for most of it. I'd figured it was just some weird, confusion-induced hallucination that I would wake from shortly. Then the doors were somehow the same door and the mirrors were all gone and that was when I panicked. I did not possess the capacity to think up portal doors.

On the outside, half for Cinna's sake and half for my own, I tried to logically figure a way out. On the inside I was screaming and sobbing and tearing my hair out of my skull. I wailed for the company in my head that had followed me for so long. I knew I hadn't been speaking to myself in the second person. I may have been insane and hallucinating but I was sure of the fact that someone had been whispering in my ear.
I suggested another force at play to Cinna, thinking only of my ghostly companion. All the time we were talking I mentally berated him. It was you! I screamed, and again, It was you, it was you, it was you.

And where had that revelation gotten us? Here. Still not Tesela. Now, perhaps I was harsher with my judgement of the world than others were, but I plead the right of the universe hating me. And besides that, most would agree that blinking your eyes open in a place that was not the pace you had fallen asleep in (not that you'd actually fallen asleep, it had been more like a flashy light which abducted you) with grizzlies roaring in your ears and a smoky mint flavour in your tongue to what appeared to be your own face a matter of inches above what was actually the face you were using to see and cover your grey matter with, was fairly fucked up.

Last time I had blinked my eyes open slowly, disoriented, or even lazily as the odd sensations of my travel had faded in my mind. This time, I jolted awake, sensing consciousness and grappling with it momentarily before making it mine as soon as it teased its ugly head. The first thing I was aware of was pain as I seized, arching my back and curling my fingers into fists. I could feel my every orophus expanding and drilling into me, a wild and aggressively savage assault on every inch of my skin.

I was distracted from my agony by the equally-as-potent light. Like an interrogation lamp I couldn't close my eyes against, it burned into my retinas and made my eyes ache; the equally-as-pungent scent and taste of a mint plantation going up in flames; the equally-as-dangerous and disturbing deep-seeded knowledge that I know nothing.

The ordeal lasted an eternal second and then was gone as quickly as it had set upon me. Sensually overloaded, my entire body faded to numb. I lay perfectly still and tried to open my sticky, encrusted eyes. I figured that even if it was a confining death trap that awaited me, the movement of my eyelids would not spell my doom any more than an episode like my convulsions would. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them, cautiously, fearfully, like an egg just hatching. My eyes went wide as I realized what was before me. My vision was encompassed in a gigantic sunspot. I could recognize it on my eyelids as I slid them shut, purplish-red like a bruise and pulsing angrily.

"Ey, sleepy head," said a very close voice. I could tell it was close to me because it was little more than a whisper and yet I could hear it clearly, and it was close in my memory because I knew it. I knew it because this was the voice that had whispered in my head for so many years, the one that had recently gotten stronger, louder, and ultimately uprooted my life and led me here. I hated it immediately.

I furrowed my brow and set my mouth in a hard line. Straining, I stared and blinked, stared and blinked straight ahead until the contusion-like blurs subsided and my head had cleared of white noise and static. Under me, I could feel something like a bed of burrs and straw, feathers and gritty dirt. Above me, I could see a face, and connected to that a body and around him (for, it seemed to be masculine) some sort of tall, golden stalks with vibrant green sprouts at their ends and beyond those an impossible aqua sky with dusty grey cloud-like formations floating daintily around in small circles.