Exiled King

Reach out your hand to grasp the lovely peach, to pull it from its stem. It slips through your fingers like air. Try again. No sensation of touch to match the vision. Nothing is there. The peach is a mirage. Either nothing is there, or it is your own hand that is entirely insubstantial, less than a ghost. Maybe it is you that is the mirage. Try again, fail again. The peach hangs there, untouched. Try, try, fail. The rage that bubbles up seems more than is justified, but…it is a fact. When the world refuses to participate in your plans, you want to tear it all down.

Long ago, I ingested a hallucinogen that caused me to see visions of real-world objects that were so convincing I thought I could interact with them. My flesh apparently existed in a different dimension from these objects, which were like pictures projected on smoke, entirely unreachable.

I am grateful that the substance wore off and by morning I was back in the land of the solid.

The experience I am having now in my old age is like those hallucinations. Occasionally an idea for a short story arises in my mind. In its thought form, it carries a feeling of substance, depth, truth. Then, I begin to pull it from the ineffable realm of thought into the world of the physical: keystrokes assembling specific words, words chosen and placed in a particular order, actual sentences in black and white on a screen.

That’s when the mirage occurs. One sentence, maybe two, then…nothing. The idea that had looked so solid shimmers away, untouchable. The vocabulary required to grasp it, whatever it was, has disappeared into emptiness. In a murky void, I reach. I try and fail and fail again.

Neither the peach nor my hand is real.

Then I grow bitter and hateful. I cannot expect to wake up tomorrow and be back in the land of the solid. Apparently I must abandon the entire enterprise. The days of being a writer are over.