Diamond in the Rough

Diamonds are for life. Here’s a gem of psychedelic insight my pharmaceutical friend procured somewhere.  (Ooh, shiny!) Let me put this on my tongue and let me swallow. Let’s ease into this unalloyed, paranoid hippie monologue.

But I’m no hippie. I’m a petit-bourgeois, prim“ and proper, no improprieties to be found here. (Oh, but why am I so horny?) I can’t help it, I want to know; what’s it like being on molly? Oh so innocuous a name. Molly, Polly, Holly, folly, good golly.

At first, I feel nothing. I feel a swing in my stride, a swaying of my hips, a veering towards the flirtatious, the scandalous, the outrageous. But I’m no outrage, I’m a mouse mousing around mousily in my mousehole, all alone. Alone alone alone. I don’t want to be alone anymore, though. So why isn’t this molly, this godgiven folly, working? I can still put one foot in front of the other; no hesitation there. So, what’s up?

Spacetime, that’s what’s up. I feel Einstein’s theories of relativity bending around me; things are linear only locally. If you take in the grand view, God’s sublime view, you will see curves all around. Ah, curves, I’ve been given these raceway tracks, but yet no one wants to stick around and race till the end of the track. But can you focus? Spacetime, remember? Spacetime spacetime spacetime, I can no longer put one foot straight in front of the other. I zigzag, like a child with a full bladder. But I don’t need to relieve myself. I need to relieve myself. I need to abandon myself into the void. I need to scream into the night sky studded with all these constellations whose names I still do not know. 

I fall backwards onto the concrete and I’m no longer here, no longer at the rave, no longer surrounded by my friends, such perfect strangers. I am in a New York ballroom, Queen Extravaganza presides. “The category is Dance or Die,” she whoops. I stumble down the runway, hardly a cat on a catwalk. But at the end of the catwalk, who do I see? Another brown girl like me. Her hair is long and wild. Her wide-eyed gaze beguiles and captivates. I know her name before she even says it. Ishwari, this is my grandmother, my mother’s mother, a pretty young thing. I was too young to remember her, but there is that photo of my mother, my grandmother, and me sitting on that same bed, smiling. Proof that within this spacetime, my mother, my grandmother, and I had all hung out together. 

Ishwari, I draw closer to her, and she takes my hands in hers. She kisses me on my forehead, which opens, and I clamber, for the first time, into my own third eye. I am an ouroboros, annular, circular, ever recurring, eternal. I am a nought, a nothing, empty. I am complete, my fingers dipping into myself, the posture of supreme satisfaction, and I give myself permission to see and to mourn for the first time. 

My third eye is littered with half-finished projects, half-baked ideas, half-completed goals: I feel like my arena of failures has been visible for everyone to judge me by. My dreams of the trumpet, the piano, my dreams of jazz, my dreams of plays, playlets, novels, novelettes, novellas. Oh Cruella! Cruel is the way that time flows in one direction even though we probably have the mathematics to travel in all directions. Oh, how I would like to revisit the past, to set this bully straight, that bully straight, to dispel the condescension, to shoo away the unwanted remarks, glances, touches, which have all but shrivelled my soul. Oh, I am no mouse. I was made to be a mouse, but I was born to be a gazelle, nimble and playful. I was born to be bold and audacious, not this coward retreating in fear and shame. To be or not to be, I’ve played Hamlet too long, I can’t dither and fritter away this time, not this time. 

I fall to my knees, and I pray to the stars whose names I don’t know, from within the privacy of my third eye, my universe. I pray to overcome my fear, my pain, my traumas, so banal, so quotidian, and yet which still grip me tightly around the throat. How long has it been since I properly took a breath? Filling my lungs fully. How had I ever come this far without knowing how to inhale and exhale? Did my fear extend that far, too afraid to even breathe? Mouse indeed, mousing around humbly about the house.

Oh, can you stop? Ishwari speaks to me outside my third eye. Climb out of that hole! I try to obey but find it hard to get back on my feet. Ishwari reaches her arms inside my third eye and I grab onto them. She heaves and pulls, and out I plop, covered in amniotic fluid. The caul has been removed from my eyes, but it’s temporary. My landscape of failures will follow me wherever I go, but I can choose to make peace with it, and cultivate a new soil, plant new seeds in a newer landscape. 

“The category is do or die! Try or cry!” exults Queen Extravaganza. I blink, and I am back on the catwalk. Will I strut my stuff? Will I walk in style, grace, comfort, decisiveness, delayed gratification? Will I walk in joy? There’s still time left in the countdown. Spacetime itself wants me to succeed; spacetime can’t wait for me to cloak myself in its mysteries, its esoteric equations, and dazzle others in my turn. My diamond is fading like a dream. I am still on the concrete. Someone helps me off the ground. I thank them and look up at the stars. I still don’t know their names, but I am going to learn.