Someone Else's Shoes

  

  I saw these shoes the other day, tucked neatly away inside the nook of a large building on Bálint Balassi utca.  Decent pair of kicks, even without the laces.  Who and why, I wondered.... x

Me, On The Edge of Creativity

  Something strange happened last night.  Strange but very cool.  I'm not sure how to proceed or even if I can. It was all in my head anyway.
  Yesterday evening, I was in our kitchen washing up some dishes after preparing the marinade for our fajitas.  Fajitas are one of our comfort foods, whose ingredients are easily procured from the ABC downstairs.  It was a comfort food night, cold and smoggy.
   I was at the kitchen sink, staring down into the bubbly dish water, when I began to feel slightly faint.  I tried to ignore it, thinking it would pass.  I'd been sick  so feeling kind of woozy has been my status of late.
  It got worse.  Quickly.  Soon my vision was blurry and my body began to feel icy and numb.  I felt as if I might vomit if I stood there any longer so I shuffled out of the kitchen, turning briefly to tell Aidan and Boone, "I feel sick".  I travelled through what felt like a nauseating worm hole to my bedroom, dark and warm, and plopped face first onto the bed, clumsily wrapping myself in the tangled duvets.  I'm not one to make my bed on a daily basis.
  Boone followed shortly to check on me, asked if I was okay, and I said I was, as long as I could just lay  there for a few minutes.
  As I lay there, the spins slowly easing and the nausea retreating, I began to have visions....yes, visions, but only inside my head.  They came without any effort, seemingly on their own, like an internal reel of clips.  There were faces, scenes, animals, all presented in different styles from animation to abstract expressionism.  I realized they were ideas...ideas for drawings, collages, photographs.  Coming from me.  But I had no way to hold onto them.  Nothing stuck.
  This visual process was backed up by the most intense aural hallucinations I've ever had.  Sometimes between wake and sleep, my brain cooks up melodies and harmonies, sometimes with vocals, which lull me sweetly into dream land.  These compositions almost always disappear upon waking and I'm never sure whether or not they are mixed up regurgitations of the music I listen to on a daily basis.
  The music I heard inside my head last night was all me. Like the visions, they seemed to come on their own.  They sounded original and seemed unreferenced. To me, they sounded beautiful.  I wanted to hold them down, rmember them.  But like the visions they were slippery and would not stick.
  Now, I swear I had not taken anything to induce this little mind trip, which sounds a whole lot like an acid flashback.  No cold meds, nothing, just a few sips of hot wine passed my lips last night.
  Whatever it was, I loved it.  I felt joy.  I rarely feel joy, I feel her fleeting past from time to time but rarely able to catch her by the tail.
  I stayed in my cocoon of duvets for a half hour, perhaps, I couldn't tell because the dimension of time wasn't discernable to me then. I was lost in this wonderland of creative bliss.
  When I finally arose, heading back into the kitchen to complete my tasks and eat my fajita, (Boone had popped the marinating chicken into the oven) my body was shaking but my mind was as clear as crystal.  I was also ravenous.  I made short work of my fajita, declaring happily, "I will never get tired of these."
  I realize that this experience is probably nothing that unusual.  Who knows what we as individuals go through on a daily basis, unshared, unspoken.  But I really felt like this was a message from my higher self (who seems to have been on a decades long retreat) to my conscious self. Look what you can do.  See what you could have done. Enjoy a glimpse of could have been, what might still be. Do it.  That part of the experience is still not quite evident.  All I know is that I came out of this episode curious, content, and incredibly hungry.