As a new hire, I find it strange to have my experiences retrospectively dubbed as spiritual, healing, and above all some kind of awesome.

       —‘You don’t say it—but you’re connected.’ ‘I dream of those mountains. There’s something in there. And you were only too asleep to know. You had a spiritual partner, but you two were at different levels.’—

          But I know—and only the very beautiful ‘I’ knows— that in those Times, I felt fear and loneliness like a crepuscular vignette on the outside of my vision, but I did not experience energy vortexes; I felt nothing akin to what a prophet might feel, and only resentments were borne of my days then, with the sleepy body resting in the back nook of the car and my mind with the rosary and cannabis in the glove compartment.

       So when you say such things, I feel a slight betrayal to some pith/faith/darkness/sensuality that I live by—and yet you dream to drive those mountains, to freeze your arm and platelets in those rivers—do you also dream of genuflecting with an impoverished soul, bowing to landscapes that you cannot appreciate? Do you know that Mt. Shasta, Multnomah, and the Golden Gate—these are symbols of my disjointedness—do not make me feel as though I am chosen to be good, but the opposite? That I have seen too much. That the other levels must get selfish and rotten like a depressing garret.

       I think everyone’s full of it. I sense signals and they make my smiles turn to scowls. But then I’ll laugh at the absurdity and noise based on my intake of the conversation. What self-derived misery! 

       I’ll enjoy a meal surrounded by new folk who were good for the day; joy will run its hands along my spine; my eyes will be spiked by the kindness I see emanating around me… what Misery. Where are we?

    (Fictional Purposes only, all connections and correlations to real individuals or places are adapted for the purpose of the passage and do not reflect current realities. :))

-s. ponce