Limited Sight Distance
M. Jeanette Kelleher

Was that the night we went to the carnival?

Wait, no, we went to more than one carnival every year more than just once and we always sucked on blotters or geltabs, later it was sugarcubes and somehow I mash all the trips into one monumental swirl of elongated faces and limbs pulsing condensing and mutating grotesquely. The first time an older girl gave it to me in the high school's smoke-clouded bathroom I couldn't believe it was so tiny, and I put the quarter centimeter square of white blotter paper on my tongue when I got on the bus to go home. It still hadn't dissolved by the time I reached my doorstep and I swallowed the soggy pieces. For about an hour I studied myself in the mirror on my bedroom door and I don't remember when it began only that I was rocking back and forth in a chair crying and laughing hysterically at the same time. All of the nights were significantly insignificant roaring with hysterical sobs. I felt flames of panic surge up my chest cavity, explode, and make my muscles weak and watery whenever I saw the face in front of me lose gravity, detach itself from itself eyes floating up and out, nose paused in a moment passed padded by a shift in dimension that is vacuuming the rest into the place where there was a mouth but now only the void of a sinister funhouse clown's knowing frozen guffaw, and I feel the click of time just halting, but the eternal moment is shattered by my own deep shudder of laughter and I realize the perverted face is my friend asking me what is so funny. I can only stutter and cringe and fidget. Sometimes I climbed out of my first floor bedroom window every imperceptible creak fancying itself into my parents finding me with one leg outside and the other trembling from supporting my weight and terror of making any noise above a low whispered scrape. Two feet on the ivied bank beneath my windowsill and I'd creep over the front lawn expecting a police car to pass by and notice a suspicious teenager warily making her way to the idling car a block away. In the passenger seat I found a neon paisley universe and two dilated pupils saying "heyyyy" and speeding me elsewhere, anywhere. There was the night we kept eating hits and drove around lost in a familiar neighborhood, and at 5 AM galloped through the empty business district, kept eating hits until dawn brought us to a park where we smoked what we had traded for a few blotters and the whirling billows we exhaled painted the landscape into a psychedelic poster. There was the time when a yellow gel capsule turned a standard living room in 3-bedroom house sitting on a cul-de-sac in a pre-fab development in suburbia into a day-glo rainforest chirping with exotic liveliness. There was the night we crawled between headstones and let the stars drip syrupy luminous dew onto us. There were teardrop-shaped breath-mint bottles full of experiences that pasted scenes on top of scenes of layers of paranoid euphoric visions magnified and cut up again-again-again and glued into an impossible texture of misfit puzzle pieces, words that have no meaning strung together between warm cheeks aching from uncomfortably lined fits of ecstatic laughter. It was the most comical of tragedies. It was the intensity that drowns a 9 year old at a carnival. It was hysterical nauseating engorgement that seemed relentless but scattered as the birds began to chirp and the sun seeped over the edge of the earth and I cradled my protesting stomach sizzling in toxic chemical residue and eventually sunk into tar black unconsciousness never dreaming, drained and blank and unable to reinvent the feeling of the world whizzing by on a carnival ride. It has been dwindling into void for at least 3 years now.