It dissolves on his tongue. The faintest of sour flavors comes as an aftertaste. The wait that comes next is enough to destroy the most patient of people. Energy begins to flow through his body, surging and pumping and slushing from and around his body.  The warmth of togetherness takes over, but he’s alone. A connectivity with inanimate objects in the surrounding environment create understandable confusion, but he embraces where he is going. He agrees to be taken.

Breathing loses its automatic drive and becomes a conscious activity. No noise to be heard, but it sounds beautiful. Synesthesia has the walls melting into strawberry flavored silk and the leaves on trees solidifying into round loud clouds.

He’s confused, but refuses to let it scare him. There is something to be learned where he’s heading. As his confining walls vanish into the nothing behind him, reality is stripped away and he begins to lose the awareness of what makes him who he is. He is one with everything.

An overwhelming joy burst forth and rips his body to shreds. The glass from which his body is constructed shatters into a pile and liquefies, spreading evenly across the nothingness.

A bright light consumes the endless void and reaching out from it is a hand. Some shape other than the abstract emptiness of the void previously inhabiting perception. It reaches into the void, grabs ahold of seemingly nothing and perception is dragged out of it. Sudden awareness of self returns after an infinity of statelessness. His physical body is present again. The sun has nearly risen and his body is drenched in a frosty sweat caused by the transition from one plain of existence into the next and back. Understanding of time returns and he realizes this previous eternity was no more than a couple of hours of his life.

By Carlos Zenof