The placid black Door lay closed, flat on the ground. My arms flailing and legs kicking, with a sensation of swimming downward, while kicking up. I wonder, ‘am I falling down toward the door, or is the door falling to me? Is this real, or…’ I can’t tell. All surroundings give off a fuzzy orange hue. Time is slipping, and there is no single point of light to give reference. It’s not dark, or night. There is a light spreading everywhere, like an ambiguous, ethereal matter, I’m floating through.
The black door, rushing forward—up, giving way, as my foot circles up, then down, touching the smooth surface, in a downward, crescent motion. The door opens in slow motion, to an undying, white light that floods the scape I now helplessly travel, taking me. ‘Where am I, and where am I going?’ I hear myself ask. ‘What is this tug, this drawing of my will that leaves me empty and full?’ The surroundings of my endless fall, shifts black, then orange, then white again.
The door begins to spin in a slow 180 degree arc, giving a head-spin sensation, with no comprehension of up or down. A feeling similar to my first surfing experience in Ocean Beach. The wave took me, tumbling round and round…Curtis, saved me that day.
In a memory so long ago, that may or may not be reality, I float down, up through the frame of the black door, as it fully opens. Through the passage way, whiteness clings to my naked body in or out the other side. ‘Where are my clothes? Where are the jeans mom bought me yesterday, or some other time.’ Thinking evades all. The whiteness embraces, with no one to see, I’m left exposed and covered all at once.
‘How is this happening? How am I falling, and where did I come from? What is real?’
The deer. That magnificent Buck lay in a heap, sprawled across a fallen tree, with one eye turned skyward—I killed it. How and why did I do that?
“To prove you are a man!” the voice of my father came.
“No! I couldn’t have killed him.”
The whiteness clears, taking the dead deer and forest with it.
A freeway comes, and a truck—a Semi-truck, with a fully loaded trailer. Tires bulging from the overloaded weight.
Now I see from outside myself, flying, falling, floating, watching my backside hit the drivers door of the white, F150. The fresh splattered red, resembles a painting of, Jackson Pollock. It’s beautiful and painful. The pain is too intense to bare.
Whiteness engulfs me, and the scene changes again. I am standing in front of a red, convertible Mustang. Curtis is sitting in the back on the passengers side. He’s pale white, and frantic, tugging, pulling on something—what is it? The thought is too distant to see…. Familiar hands help him, as terror seizes my limbs, freezing me where I stand. The Semi is here, cresting the overpass, to take what is so precious. Life. Because it hates life. It screams and howls as a demon from above, while tires jitter on the white-top freeway. That heavy trailer, careens to us with unreal gravity. Tires pull from the road, as the white box shifts sideways, flashing us with a blinding white reflection from the sun. Looming above, in threatening suspension. Threatening to take me away from him.
Hope fades. I’m not ready for you to—
There is nothing I can do. I am helpless. I am alone. I watch the white descend, to leave me in darkness.
“Curtis! No!” Darkness swallows me, and the life I know.
Once again, I fly and fall backward, this time through that placid black Door as before, as it swings full circle around me to my front, the door invades my vision, only to be replaced by the screaming pain that pierces my backside and head. That familiar white light, puncturing the ethereal mist.
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