Liquid Colour

‘So, you just put the cigarette in this little thing, and it filters out all of the bad stuff’, this drunken man in his dishevelled suit won’t leave me alone. I let him buy me a drink and my plan was to escape from him in the smoking area but now I’m stuck with him mansplaining some stupid contraption that he thinks makes him look cool. ‘It’s like all of the fun and none of the cancer’, his breath stinks of Jager, I have to get away from him. I give him a courtesy ‘uh huh’ and walked away. I came with a friend, but I haven’t seen her in hours. The club is small I should be able to see her if I get up high. 

Clambering onto the raised platform, things are getting kind of blurry. I don’t usually drink this much this quickly, but I was angry at my friend. She ran into some people we vaguely knew and she all but ignored me to speak to them. Well in my head that’s how it went. On reflection I do have jealousy, attachment, and abandonment issues that I guess might have come into play in that moment. Either way, I was ready to forgive and forget, and most importantly, go home. I scanned the room until I saw her, she was lingering near the doorway, hopefully that means she wants to call it a night too. I float through the sea of sweaty bodies. I could feel the wetness seeping through my clothes, but I chose to ignore it as I needed to concentrate more on staying upright. 

Once I finally reached her, that last rum and coke from the cigarette guy was really setting in. It was like I could feel the mix of alcohol and sugar running through my blood stream and manifesting in a blurred film over my eyes and a muffled plug in my ear. We must have exchanged words before leaving but I don’t hear them or remember speaking them, but we’re leaving so I don’t care. I can see my feet; I’m concentrating on my feet, but there still somehow stumbling and spinning. They were blurry, then focused, then doubled, then one, and then they were gone. 

It felt like someone had hit me with a baseball bat right in between my eyes. However, it wasn’t wet, there was no blood. In fact, all the sweat and alcohol that had previously covered my body was also gone. I was bone dry, and warm. Apart from my head, my body felt light and airy, like if I took a step my body could lift me and take me away with the wind. The thought was both intriguing but scary, so I didn’t step, I just stood, and for the first time opened my eyes. 

Everyone was gone, my friend, the bouncers, the weird cigarette guy, those people always selling noss outside the club, everyone. There was only pavement, the club, and the opposite skyscraper, as well as the tens of other businesses that were down the street were all gone. I had to step, I had to reach the end of the street and see if that street was gone too. I stepped and I didn’t float, but the ground was soft, like clay beneath my feet, sinking a few milometers with each step only to be released again with the next. I could feel the air now too, encompassing my skin as I moved. I should’ve felt alone and vulnerable in the vast nothingness where the buildings used to be but instead, I felt embraced by the earth and the air. Not in a hippy at one with nature kind of way, but in a literal, physical, like receiving a comforting hug from the elements. 

The sensation was so enjoyable, it took me a second to realise that I wasn’t going anywhere. Now I was panicking, I tried instead to head sideways, into the nothing but that felt worse. The was no longer comforting, it was tight, even suffocating and the floor hardens and is slamming against my feet with each step. I have to stop. I stand still, waiting for the floor to soften and for the air to forgive but it doesn’t. Instead, it stops with me, the was floor, the air was air, and I began to feel silly that it had ever felt any different. 

The hairs on my arms began to stand on their end. My surroundings suddenly felt humid and my skin moist, and then damp, and then wet. But I wasn’t hot, it wasn’t sweat, it was something else. I wiped the clear liquid excreting from my skin and as it touched my fingertips it turned a light pink colour. And as it dropped from my finger it turned deep blue, before hitting the ground and turning green. The green spread out across the floor and became textured. It looked like moss but when I touched it it was more like silk. Every time I dripped it changed colour, it was purple, it was black, it was beige, and it was beautiful. I wiped the soggy film off me over and over, but it kept coming back. The liquid kept refilling around me, gushing out of my pores. After it was beige, it was white and by this time it had filled the entire floor. The pavement was now gone too, the landscape even more vast, filled with even more nothing. Then it was red, and it spread quickly, quicker than the other colours. Covering the floor and looking like that one scene in the shining that scarred me as a child. I rubbed my arms again, hoping for another colour, for something different. I longed for the first light pink, but my skin was dry.

I backed away from the spread of the red sea in front of me. Stumbling backwards, tripping over myself, the colour creeped closer and closer, and I moved faster and faster until my back eventually hit something hard and cold. I couldn’t turn so I just ran my hand over it. It was bumpy and rough, but familiar. I could hear murmuring; I could see light. 

‘Are you okay?’, I opened my eyes. My back was to the pavement, and I could see high into the sky. I had to blink a few times to clear my vision, when the blinking didn’t work, I wiped them with my hand, and I saw it, the red. I clearly looked panicked because my friend placed her hand on mine. ‘It’s okay, you fell and cut the top of your nose’. She looked at my hand, ‘it’s just a bit of blood’. 

Turns out in my drunken state I had tripped up the curb and smacked the bridge of nose on the pavement. My friend had quickly turned me over to assess the damage before calling an ambulance, which had caused the blood to trickle from my nose down into my eyes, which I’m sure looked like a horror movie. However, now that I had wiped it away, I had a clear view of not only the night sky but also the club's neon sign, that flashed from pink, to blue, to green…