Not Even One Grain of Sand Leads to the Final Question

by Rene Salinas

“”I couldn’t stop her. She pulled the trigger.

“Wait!” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this, now?” A frantic second of panic, accompanied by an emphatic sense of inevitability. Too late… I looked, and she looked back with a facial gesture resembling something akin to surprise mixed with desperation — still holding the injection gun.

I could see her face changing.

She placed the gun on the sand…

“DMT,” I said, “is not something you just…” She laid on the top of a dune.

“It’s a good thing I brought you here,” I continued, decreasing the tone and intensity of my voice. The dialogue turned internal as she was overtaken by the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science.

Sitting down on a sand mountain, she looked relaxed; quiet but still active. I could see it in her eyes. They were blinking faster than usual. For reasons unknown to me an imperative sense for essentials crept in as I questioned myself:

Do we have everything we need?

She turned and looked in a convincing fashion. Maybe she wants to show me something important, I thought.

She held my hand and began to talk.

I. The Apparation

“My mind lays nestled in my interior life, at home only with my own ideas. I care not for the objectivity or any association of value. I have arrived,” she murmured.

Nothing was ever so beautiful as her smile, which travelled, suspended in silence as she proceeded, trying to explain.

“All my intending should just be transposed into an actual deed. Might as well, right?” She looked with intent to which I responded.

I said, “Right.”

She frowned. It made me feel uneasy. Maybe this newfound wisdom had given her extra powers, I thought. Now she will be able to see right through me — clearly knowing when I am telling the truth and when not, I anticipated.

She held my hand as she drifted deeper into her thoughts.

“Have you ever experience the withdrawal of self-imprisonment?” She adventured.

“Let me think,” I replied.

“What? Why do you have to think?” She asserted and demanded. “Trying to make an internal commentary of what one is doing — is just a kind of illusion.” She looked back at me; it took me by surprise.

She made me feel like a child caught while stealing. I felt the need to act; to put on a mask.

To react.

“No,” I meant,“ No, I haven’t,” I assured her. “Sorry,” I apologized, trying to make up for the clear lack of awareness needed for the expansive moment of consciousness.

“I get it,” she kept adding “It can be compared to putting into words something that cannot be put into words.”

“I have been displaced and pushed so hard that it hurts; I have stumbled upon my double-meanings, my many centres, yet no epicentre to claim mine.” She looked down at the sand and began to draw an inward spiral with her index finger — until a calm moment of silence arrived.

I started to realize, maybe becoming monosyllabic was the best choice, so I let out a tentative, “Oh.”

Her normal reaction to that reply would have been a punch in the arm plus a scream. Something like, “Stop being so condescending.” But today, given the circumstances, she continued to draw in the sand.

A spiraling, finger painting picture. When she arrived in the centre of the sandy vortex, she exhaled with a serious face; she still had more things to share:

“Yeah! See… my inconsequential morality based on my unskilful thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion, or delusion…” As silence reigned, she continued drawing.

II. Movement of Time or Space?

“Transcends time and space.”

“And/or space…”

“Can you just feel it?” She asked in confidence, putting her hand at the side of her mouth, in case someone would hear her.

It had been two or maybe three hours since the last round of questions. I had a finite number of clouds counted on my way to deciding the exact colour of this desert landscape as well as singing “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, albeit only internally. The fear of interrupting the flow of events was always present and palpable.

She interjected again, this time an appeal:

“Guide me with some space? Where guiding me becomes the efface.”

“Just to clear my head; Emptying my mind.”

“Saving both time and space… Would you find the will to replace?”

“Time — Space.”

She let the last letter resound, before she did the same with the next.

“Space — Time.”

She had slowed down so much that when she pronounced Time it felt as if time indeed was slowing down to stillness.

She inhaled and continued with flawless nature…

“My past is over as my future becomes present. Moreover, this timeless lady that conducts — with an enchanting melody of gentle sounds, through impetus constructs. Arranging Time as an intimate unit of measure. A careful entwine of harmonious pulses, a devoted beat of finite proportions — filling my emptiness in outpours of themes. Behold perception — through a myriad of paths in motion without an obvious connection. Composing lines in ridden destiny; hiding shadows of a time never left behind.”

She looked down and fell silent again.

As soon as she finished, I interrupted the mood with one of my more subtle comments. “Poetic,” I said. Affected by the silence, the contemplative mood created, I felt I got my notebook out.

III. Chromatic Aberration

It had been the best part of five hours. Most of them had been used by the silence in her with me trying to remember a poem in the distance. Scribble after scribble trying to put the words together, again, my thoughts surreptitiously left out a gesture or a phrase.

“Was it time or space then?” I asked, still trying not to interrupt the moment.

She looked at me, pale, tired, with crystal clear eyes, sandy clothes and her dreadlocks tied up with my handkerchief. Looking at the sand, she just interrupted my questioning as if she hadn’t been through with the speech and I had rudely interrupted the flow.

“Shh!” — She continued emphatically, opening her hands like some sort of conductor, moving constant waves of air from one part to the other in a harmonious fashion. I dared not interrupt, so I looked at the sand just for a few seconds when she began sharing:

“Listen to the concealed tune that lies behind the dream – castles placed on a sandy dune. One iridescent stream of sunshine alone will softly cry, on a fragment of a tearful light; as it mourns — the refulgent prism of lament can’t but uphold the reflection with intent. A rainbow, hoping for a constant unfolding of colour, but the untrained eye nascent only an infinite array of gradients of sorrow through enchanted melodies of irony that fail to borrow; the essence that lies playing with notes undefined. The conductor bathed by harmonious reveries, but they all decline; suddenly, an asinine duplicate, disguised by the dark enticed by the straight and narrow line. Still, we stand waiting for the next show as our human consciousness dissolves through the mind to our spine it liquefies.”

I had put the pen down; I devoured the moment. Silence had amplified every nuance, every syllabic compound, every intention inherent of meaning. Each and every word continued to permeate and resound and made me think only in terms of wilful thoughts which in turn placed my emotions upside down. A sudden rush of abandonment took over.

I placed my hands on her arms.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

What was about to happen, depended on the outcome and the tone of the answer.

“Yes, yes!” She replied, “Everything is fine now.”

“Good,” I nodded.

I reached for the gun, loaded a new dose, and injected myself.

Rene Salinas. An IT technician from the UK that loves to write; has participated for years in national and international competitions. Driven by the need of exploration in writing and the desire to follow in particular the path laid by Jack Kerouac and his views onto the methodology of ‘Spontaneous Prose.