f a h i m a i f e —

from BLUE VIPERS

I. 

In the glass building, the handsome crone asks, are you a ——— ? I squint a little before saying, I don't know, followed quickly with a glimmer, a smile, I don't think so. 

Before appearing as glass, I was inside a cavity. I was pressurizing for something I was fully aware of even if I could not yet articulate its imminence. Being squeezed as if to death, I was happy because I imagined myself as something iridescent. The pain of it, the greater devastation, none of that felt as significant as the muted signification. I was on my way to something major. The walls kept pressing down, condensing. 

My whole life, up until this point, had been a series of contractions. I had been in deep trouble since birth. Something about the hatred of women-flora-fauna and ones like us, the partitioning of the planet, stolen drums, linear control, admixture, forced religion, familial secretions, perennial war, the creolization of canal cities, radiance shining into simultaneous dimensions. I had been vivid since birth. 

Now alive in the wet mouth of California reminiscing about the dry husk of California, evaporating into pure streams. I move further inside a rhythm of our spiritual impression. I burrow deeper inside my family's raw narrative. I begin to feel confident when saying, on my mother's side, we are Black-Latina-Jews, until I believe my particular inheritance is a blessing. I want to feel something other than loss, less like a constant gushing wound, the bastard spawn-of-a-bitch, unwanted, perhaps a gift to offset what I once believed a curse we do not discuss outside the family. It's always up, down. I appear hot-bodied, alluring. I am wanted too much or not at all. It's been this way since birth. I think about not being. On a cliff I meet Soul who says, I am an Arab-Jew, an Afro-Jew, and you, like me, come from a cycle of endurance. 

I decide it makes sense to go on living.

II. 

The stray channel says, illusion, illusion. I avoid mediated elements. I avoid cattle farms as much as possible.

Lying on the floor of my coastal rental home, I begin triple lucid dreaming. I dreamt if I won the lottery, I would continue writing poetry. My greatest joy would be buying a house which is really just the way Diaspora flows through me, only a little bit residual colonial. I was fantasizing about the architecture of my dream, the way light would appear through the trees through all the windows, the original 100-year-old hardwood floors, the wrought-iron staircase, the dark brown wood beams on the white ceiling, the fireplace, the deer who would sometimes appear in the green back yard. I even felt the music, textural noise, and other schematics of  the home recording studio. I record my first album, and my second, other people make music there too. I host dinner parties for all the beings I love, a little backwoods, just a little bit residual maroon. In a moment between not working on any of the three books I believe I am writing, I send a message to Soul with a string of words about this fantasy of living deep inside a forest, growing a bunch of food, and cooking slow meals to feed all the people we love. Then he does that thing to let me know he loves the message, so I know I'm not alone, even though I am alone on my board, in the middle of the ocean.

The stack of books on the kitchen table gives off the impression of deep study. I pass the books on my way from one condition to the next. I fall in and out of deep rest. First, a health crisis. Because the narrator is heroic, I survive the crisis like a good method actor. In the middle of clapping for myself, my body goes into anaphylactic shock from an extended cortisol spike. Foaming at the mouth, I surrender to being. I lose time. Exist in gray abstraction. On the central California coast, we call it Winter. Because we are old, a beloved friend slinks with me. We curl into each other as air pulses. Dank. Antidotal.

Coiling, I understand my creative process moves in spirals like the planets in our solar system. It just flows. Sometimes around me. Sometimes through me. I try to keep up with the movement. Most often it drags me into endless dark nights of soul. With my head pressed against my lover's head, we watch all the Star Wars movies in a successive blur. Everything is blue. Or, it's just seasonal affective disorder. Everything affects me. I begin to care less about human accountability. Nothing makes sense. I lose touch with anything not my frequency. I metabolize the continuity of life. My pores open.

My creative process unfolds serpentine. There are no rules. When I relax into it, I feel pulled on by something willful, youthful, feminine. I forget time. I have no frame of reference for ever being situated in time. I have no idea who the president is. If this or the next is an election year. What political party I once affiliated with. What tax bracket I inhabit. What proximity I belong to. What subjectivity or group of subjectivities I claim. What human category. What emergency contact I would list in case of emergency. What dietary restrictions I once possessed. What languages I speak. What country I take up residence. What citizenship I claim. What profession, what preoccupation, what obsession. What useful glitch. What hallucination. What lingering sentiment of lust. What sweetheart. What last name of origin. What last origin of name. 

III. 

Before driving across the country, I was a woman on her way to something. Standing at the bottom of California, I am staring at a blue sign. The sign is painted with three or four yellow poppies. The white cursive letters say, welcome to paradise. The dusty ground says, bring your own water. The version I was is no longer with us. 

Here on Lone Coast, seven days after trading my previous reality for this one, I am inside my beloved avatar in a cannabis dispensary. My golden woman wears a black linen dress, black Arizona Birkenstocks, her long dreadlocs hanging beneath a large brimmed Fulani hat, her redbrown skin is glowing. My gold-rimmed glasses shining. I am looking at a security guard. A bright blue glow surrounds him. He is dressed in all black. Because we are still a living global health crisis, he's wearing a light blue face mask. His dark beard is sticking out the sides of his mask. His long hair in a ponytail. His dark eyes and eyebrows shining. The corners of his eyes smile upward, his entire bright face is open as if stunned or pulled from deep inside a daydream. Where are we? Our eyes indicate we have known each other before. Because the ground is water, I feel dizzy. I slide my Driver's License from my wallet, pass it to him. He quickly scans my card, is able to determine very fast that I am who I say I am, he is able to do this while I am speaking.

The entire room is bright, dim. I inhale deeply. Everything is breathing. I walk the ten or fifteen steps to the counter, where I hand my Driver's License to another human who smiles at me as if they have always been smiling. They say, today you get a discount since it is your first time. They explain I will need to buy everything with cash, then points to the cash machine. They gesture to another human and says, they will help you if you have any questions. The other person walks up to me, smiling, hands me a small basket. Now I am reaching for cannabis in forms I did not know existed, like sparkling water, tea, chocolates, lavender lemonades, gummies, fruit strips, fruit chews, tinctures, lotions, and forms I am familiar with like flower, cookies, and pre-rolled joints. I am staring at a tin of indica tea and sativa tea, going back and forth between night and day. I cannot recall who thought to separate strains into day highs and night highs. Weed never touches me like that. I feel purple highs, red highs, something in between. I generally recoil away from red highs unless I want to strike a bunch of people. Purple highs are more my thing. When it's purple I can drift off into a cushy pit and just coil somewhere elevated.

Looking up, I notice the security guard is no longer at the podium. The room has shifted. Somehow I am still the only customer. One of the weed slingers walks up wearing one of those Chesire cat grins which feels like a perfect way to greet dawn. I say, no, I don't need any help, as I place two four packs of sparkling water in my basket. Overhead, I hear Pedro Ricardo singing "Cantar das Kandakinhas" I begin dancing. I've added three or five different versions of edibles to the basket mostly because the packaging is so whimsical. Childlike. I feel as if I could have drawn the botanical flowers on the box, that I could have folded the origami pentagon that is the packaging. The song is still playing so I think, I am in Brazil. But now the song is finished so the thought has evaporated. When I play this scene back, I am careful to leave the track on repeat so I can stay in Rio de Janeiro for much longer. When I play this scene back, it will be like Black Orpheus, except Marpessa Dawn will still be alive in the end. In my version, Orfeu will not turn around. He will trust in the love he shares with Eurydice, whether he can see into her face or not, he will trust in the power of their love until they make it to the surface together. When the two of them are back on solid land, in the bright shine of day, they will turn into each other, dissolving their egos for a higher expression of love.

For a minute my algorithm is stumped. When I walk on the beach at sunset, with way too much THC in my system I become Marpessa Dawn when she was the same age I am now, which is, quite fortunately, in the middle of our life. In the dispensary, Gal Costa is singing "Baby" and I feel as if I curated the sound for this moment. My basket is heavy. I make my way to the cashier. The person at the register says, did you find everything okay? Is there anything else you need? I mumble something about needing to leave the spell. We laugh. After handing the cashier a single $500 bill I say, I never thought I would buy processed weed. 

Shit. I forgot to buy flower. Before thought can take over, I move the body towards the door. As I make my way out, a woman steps forward pushes her hands in my direction and says, the security guard wanted me to give you these. I look down, notice two colorful stickers, one black prismatic, the other reminiscent of Marrakech. I receive them, smile, and notice the security guard is still out of sight. I say thanks, and leave the shop. In the car, still feeling pulled into a swirl of Bossa Nova, I play Marisa Monte's "Diaramente" and keep it on repeat for the ten minutes it takes me to get home. Listening, I feel pulled on by something willful, youthful. For the ten minutes it takes to get home, I undulate.

When I park the car in front of the fuchsia bush out front, my neighbor Ron says, I was just thinking of you. Because Ron is in his mid-sixties, lived in an ashram down the road for forty-five years, and is a commercial cannabis farmer, I think I made him up too. Like magic, whenever I need him he appears. Like that morning he was standing at my front door with a bouquet of pungent alien fuzzies, him smiling and gesturing, I brought you some flowers. He can be this precise because he is past the middle of his life. Even though he is twenty-seven years older than me, the attraction is strong between us. Is this the age of consent? Is the age of consent like the Age of Aquarius? When I ask Ron if this is the dawning of the age of consensus, we are no longer standing outside my house, or climbing up the side of a cliff after leaving the beach, we are talking on the phone. 

A week or month has passed since I was in the dispensary. Because I am sidewinding with Ron, and he is so gifted at Tantra, it feels like twenty or two-hundred years have passed. It is 11:00pm. Because I have lost all sense of time, I call Ron. I am standing in my kitchen wearing black and white striped panties nothing else. With the cool glass of my phone pressed to my face I say, what's it like over there? Ron says, I don't know, I ate a lot of mushrooms today. Now we are talking about levels of existence. When I ask him where he is, he says, I was in one place, it felt like I was blocked, but now there are new horizons, a lot is coming into view. I have not had any mushrooms, but around 200mg of THC and no food in 24 hours. I cannot. I begin streaming off a series of coordinates. Riddlespeak. Or, bird music. Ron says, it's like you're speaking an entirely different language. I keep saying as if he can understand, now Ron says, whoa — you're way out aren't you?! I wonder if the phrase is colloquial. I want to say, my skin is too hot, I can no longer keep it on, but I cannot figure out how to mouth the words.

The invisible threads continue spinning overhead allowing us to speak even though all I have to do is walk out my front door fifty or one-hundred feet to his front door. Or say, come over. A couple weeks ago, I was listening to Joni Mitchell. I was crying about the child I forgot to have and singing loud. When I looked up, Ron was looking longingly into my window. Because he saw me humping around naked on the wooden floor, the next day he sends me Roberta Flack's "Reverend Lee" right after he sends me John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and I wonder where he's been my entire life. The next time I see him, his bald crown and shock of bright white hair curling on the sides, his smiling blue eyes reminds me of Ram Dass. I am still not convinced I did not die on the road, on day four of my trip across the country when I began hydroplaning outside Navajo Nation in Arizona. I am certain my car slid into a semi-truck, my body slammed through the driver side glass, my body impaled on the center guardrail. Where after I sat at a rest stop with a beautiful Black truck driver named David who, in between puffs of his joint said, when you get back to California, exhale, stay away from those edibles. I am convinced I have landed in the afterlife on the way to the rest of my life, especially since Ron says something about ancestors and death every other time I see him.  

On the phone I feel us stretching into yin. We are not ourselves. We make a plan to see each other the next day. But the next day, when I look out the window, Ron's RV with that SAHAJA license plate is gone. I walk to the beach alone. On the shore I meet five or six new men who all want to hold something for me. Even though I appear solo, I am carrying a lot of invisible bags. The men appear and say, here let me hold that for you. So, I begin offloading the invisible bags, careful not to dislodge any of the contents. Each time someone rushes forward, I smile and say, thank you so much, the weight of that was almost too much to bear.

Today, like every day for the past two or four months, I offload my bags quickly. Now standing here empty handed, I notice a few of the men I met weeks before carrying my bags full of pride. I realize how good it must feel for them to hold our vintage belongings. As I drift off into shared benevolence someone says, are you happy? I remember a picture of myself when I was two or three months old. My eyes are closed. My entire baby face is a smile. I am filled with joy. It seems the picture is pure sunshine. Right now, in the middle of my life, I feel as if I am only two or three months old, so new to the world. Standing on the beach, I feel bright yellow. I sip from a can of sparkling cannabis water. Because the processed THC is coursing through my system, I cannot remember what I was thinking just now. I decide to stop thinking. 

Ron points to the landscape says, it's a lot different than back East, right? Had I been living in a place called East. I cannot remember what is East of here. In the forest with Samir, who feels different removed from the cannabis shop, in his non-security guard role, he's a Jew but his soul is Chinese, in the forest he becomes his other form, a Daoist priest. He is telling me about two Chinese poets of the Tang dynasty. He says, when I lived in China, I spent a lot of time in the Wuyi mountains, the air is so much cleaner there than in the city. When he says it, I realize each time I go to a city I get sick. But walking in the redwood forest, smoking cannabis with him, I breathe easier than anywhere I have tried to breathe before. Looking down at the palm fronds, I remember being three or four years old. I was reading a Star Wars book with images from the film. I felt as if I stepped into the pages of this exact forest. I was here over forty years ago. Blurring into remembrance, I barely hear Samir who seems, as I listen, to be saying the same three words over and over, burner, drunken, dream, interspersed with Mandarin. When he speaks Mandarin, I think of my father. Samir says ... another burner ... I have no idea if he means a party, a gun, or a phone. I listen to him trail off into another story about spiritual herbs, ego death, rebirth, as we wind deeper inside the mystic forest. 

As I drift, Samir turns to me says, if you could be any mythical creature, what would you be? 

I say, phoenix, he says, me too! 

We hiss. 

I say, where are you now, in terms of fire cycles?

He says, I feel as if I just burned myself up. 

Right. He just came back from Burning Man a week ago. We sit on a fallen redwood trunk. The trunk is massive, sensual, ancient, so it demands silence. 

We sit together staring off into mutual quiet, listening to the song of the woods, doing nothing together for a very long time. This is my favorite way to hang out with a friend. 

Then he says, yeah, you could come to the house sometime.

.