It’s when you open your mouth to kiss me that I remember what I know about Quaaludes.  The details are all knit up somewhere deep inside a ball of knowledge because I learned about them in fifth grade which seems a little too early in retrospect doesn’t it, and since then I’ve wrapped whole yards of other strands of knowledge around that ball and whenever I want to remember what I know about Quaaludes I have to unravel the whole thing just to get to it.  But it’s there.  One.  They make you tired but it is kind of a verbose tired which sinks you into that three-quarters-down state, the cliff’s edge of sleep, but refuses to push you over.  Two.  They are sort of out of fashion so to get them anymore you have to know the right somebody.  Three.   Hunter S Thompson wrote about them and he is crazy or a genius depending on who you ask but the advocates of the latter say that the former is what solidifies his status as the latter anyway.  So making oneself more and more fucked up is a potential pathway to nobility and immortality – noted.  Another thing I know about Quaaludes and this is not a fact but just a general observation is that, unlike marijuana or forest fires, they don’t have a spokesperson.  So nobody can tell me what to do, nobody would or could, even it was my job specifically to stand around and wait for such an occasion, I would have no customers and I would be very bored at work.  But it isn’t my job.  I don’t kiss you, your mouth or anywhere.  I pull your slackjaw down like silly putty until it rests comfortably on the sidewalk.  Now your mouth is a door and then I walk through that door and I am in a warm womby darkness.  It’s asleep in here, it’s a trance.  The lights are off and it smells like off-brand soap.  There is a whole long hallway in your mouth and as I’m walking further and further down the hallway it becomes a dare wherein I see how completely I can yield to the atmosphere pressing in on me like a warm and dark bearhug.  Oh, look.  This is the point at which I realize there is nothing in this hallway and the hallway is actually more of a theoretical space through which I can float freely without fear of obstacles thrusting up to jab or bite or plunge into my physical harmable self.  Walking into your mouth, it is nothing like closing your eyes and walking down the street and seeing how far you can make it before you have to open your eyes again for orientation’s sake and when you do you find you have traveled much less distance than you had imagined.  This is the point at which the dare of sinking recklessly into your mouth becomes a tensionless dare because it is rooted in miserably anticlimactic stakes, like when your friend says I dare you to lick the sidewalk and you say okay and you lick it and it tastes chalky and a little dusty but after it becomes clear you are not going to drop dead with sidewalk poisoning, he says, well, that sucked, let’s play basketball.

I am thinking of another thing from fifth grade, I am thinking of that book I read, there’s a wardrobe which leads to a magical land and you can only pass through the wardrobe into the magical land if you stumble into that wardrobe by accident and keep going (also by accident), it is only accidents that allow you to be accosted by witches and fierce animals and such.  I am thinking, there are no fierce animals inside your mouth and I want to stay here, this thought is a thought that juts up into my mind like a nail so I hammer it down with another one.  Even before I learned about Quaaludes my father tried to explain the dimensions to me.  Some would say there are three dimensions and slightly smarter people would say there are four dimensions, but there are actually ten dimensions.  I won’t go into all ten of them, but the third dimension is space, the fourth dimension is how we move through space which is generally classified as time, and the fifth dimension is how all possible progressions of time play out in an infinite sequence of parallel universes.  If you picture time as a straight line, two instances form a capital V and the fifth dimension is like a bunch of Vs piled on top of each other.  I drew a map of the fifth dimension on my mirror one morning.  Actually I didn’t draw it, I punched my mirror in the enveloped rage of being awake at a worthlessly early hour, and when I punched my mirror the fifth dimension managed to draw itself in the cracks.  We could talk about the other universe where I didn’t draw this map, but instead let’s talk about how I managed to find a way out of your mouth, your kiss which became a door which led to a hallway which led to where I am now: I failed.  I thought about it.  I self-actualized.  Let’s talk about how I exiled myself from darkness by admitting I was there.  Let’s talk about waking up from a sleep so deep that it could be birth except for the pesky way your memories drum a beat on the sides of your temples except the beat is not a beat with rhythm and variation, it’s just the sound of all of the drums hitting all at once, over and over again.  Let’s talk about the noise, rumbling very low up and out of a low low low filter like being underwater twice at the same time, until those higher frequencies speckle and then settle in and the noise becomes a voice, which is saying, Are you alright?  Are you alright?  You’ve been in there a very long time, Are you alright?  It’s been an hour since the rush of the shower or a razor’s drone.  Can you hear us.  Make a noise if you can hear us.  Pressure the guttural depths of your throat or at the very least percuss the door if you can hear us.  Oh God, we’ve got a hammer and we don’t want to break it down but we will; you’ve been in there such a long time and we have begun to wonder.  We have begun to worry.