The streets are full and the sun is up, so we stay inside. We stay inside and hide from everyone we don’t want to be seen by, and stay around the ones that we would let see us just so we could have an opportunity to see them honestly.

It’s a five drink minimum here. Honesty isn’t natural and it’s laughable to defend the belief that that’s done more good than harm. I say it now, before I pay my entrance fee, because I can still keep a straight face, but I know it’ll probably come up again when I’m laughing so thin and so often that it will be camouflaged, and no one will understand the demeanor with which it was said.

I grab a glass and a shaker. More important than mixing a drink well is cleaning everything before I begin; the last thing I want to be reminded of while preparing to down my elixir of honesty is the last time I did.

It’s a five drink minimum, anything less and you’ve just cheated yourself out of the trip, like marching across Europe only to stop, turn around, and walk back when you’ve hit the borders of France. One down, and it tasted good enough to want a second; I’ll make this one a double. It glides across the tongue, burning, and then warming, and then down, so you will want another to chase it. It’s like smoking a cigar, the best taste is when it’s in your mouth; when it’s done, the taste is vile, and you don’t have more cigar to overpower it with. Three down, two to go. The last was great, wash out the mixer, make another double. Even with the same ingredients, you don’t want to remember what you’ve done, what you’re aiming to do, or all of the times that this has happened exactly the same way. This must have happened exactly the same way, a hundred times before.

Take five, and even the most timid man can overcome his fears enough to tell God what he thinks of the part he plays in His master plan. God gave me wings fashioned to let me fly, but never too high, and never too close. It’s easier to maintain a monopoly of the heavens when you let man believe that he is free to fly, but never to the extent that the heights can impede His rule.

Too many more than five, and I find I lose the ability to feel. I was in the middle of telling God what I thought, only to feel the pen being pulled from my hand, being pulled from my throat, as those around me pinned me against the kitchen floor and stopped me from acting on my God-given right to blaspheme. I went too high, and my wings had been tactically dismantled. This must be what it felt like to try to jump the throne, only to have found—even with two to one numbers—you failed to jump high enough.

I’m still being held down, and I say something about the view through my thin and constant laughs, but no one is laughing thin and constant with me.

What I don’t feel is being held down. I am just on the floor, spread in my own tragic, spread-armed snow angel, with a magnetic attraction that won’t allow me to move more. I’m sure that someone is trying to tell me something in all of this, but no one will listen after being interrupted, so I stay down and laugh about the ironic futility of struggle. I laugh, thin and constant, until it sounds like a mob around a crucifixion, because everyone knows it’s honest, so they leave me to write to God if I want.

The room begins to swim around me, but no matter how close I get to the floor, I can’t seem to drown myself. I can’t drown myself, so I get up. I’m on all fours with my eyes closed. Open my eyes, and pull myself the rest of the way up. I can’t think, I can’t form, I can’t be honest like this, but I can perceive. My train of thought has been derailed, and I’m searching over every inch of faux-wood counter top for a bit of track to start back on. I look out the window and I see a girl smoking hard. Smoking like drunken people kiss. The lushes: those who know they will regret, or be regretted, in the morning, but now is not the morning, and now we’re being honest. With each and every drag she takes I can feel the emotion and want being pulled into her along with the burning air, under such force, that the filter is made as obsolete as whatever the surgeon general is preaching to people who never wanted to live past their mid-life crisis in the first place.

I don’t know why. I honestly never want to, or think to ask, but she is the emotion that drove whatever chaos Nietzsche told me about to create. She is the ironic mother/artist in a universe of apathetic entropy. The chance coincidence that, when everything is torn down so quickly, doesn’t notice the trash heap it throws lives into is a creation twice as beautiful as any building the pieces come from.

I watch, and want, just as strongly as she does, to make something by chance and destruction, and to drag all the pain through, and breathe it in, with a control that it could never have in a filter.

I retreat to a cold room in the basement, where time is lost, in a space without windows, and an un-setting fluorescent sun. I go down with one hand grasping the only friend I know that can aid me in getting closer to God than my melted wings of wax and feathers would allow. I go down to my timeless dungeon, to fly.