A Brief Respite with Death

 The sunshine speckled in through the old, multicolored windows of the restaurants. This rainbow of dusty old, pale colors gave the place a feel of lucidity. I had sat here hundreds of times and made this same observation, but today is different. Everything has taken a slightly different tone. The pale sickly greens begin to shine brighter than before and the off tangerine oranges begin to burn like the sun. As I sit there and watched these colors begin to swirl, I can not help but think about all the times I took these colors for granted. Entranced and spinning I lose track of everything else around me. It is as if I had become one of the colors twirling through a hypnotic whirlwind of translucent color and undefined shape.

 A tap on the shoulder pulls me out of the illusion, and I turn and look up at the faces of my friends and coworkers. The three of them stand there, looking at me with grins, that seem to take on almost devilish qualities. They sit and dive right into some continuing conversation they must had been having on the way over. You see we met here all the time to discuss work and not work topics. I often got pent up into groups like this since high school, starting strange conversations that would lead to arguement, followed by a strange sort of new philosophical discovery for all of us. Today, though, was different. Distance grew and grew, until what seemed like a canyon was stretched out before us, devouring our table and leaving me looking down into a strange eternal nothingness. Across the canyon, sat the rest of my party, undetracted from their conversation by this new canyon.

 As the sight of the canyon grew in my mind, I accepted it as my new world and began to examine every nook and cranny, until before I knew it, I was flying into the pit. My chair was gone, as was the restaurant, and the sight of my friends. I was enveloped in darkness, falling and falling and falling. It was great, an experience like none before. I wished this to be my new reality, my new existence, but like everything else it was ending. Below me, a light appeared. Perhaps the end, I thought. It began to get closer and brighter and soon it encroached all of my senses and consumed me whole.

 Exclaims of laughter brought me back and I was standing in front of the restaurant, waving to my friends yelling pleasantries and other such things that were common place among us. I began to wonder what it all meant, what the hell happened. In the back of my mind I knew I knew the meaning, but in the front of my mind I was confused. This confusion though was matched and even trumped by an even greater sense of something else. Of something new, something I had never experienced before. A calm had enveloped my mind, like an armor.

 I turned ready to head home and see where the rest of this day took. I was ready for anything because I had this armor, this new form of protection caused by a strange hallucination of unimaginable happenings. The steps I took forward from my spot on the sidewalk had a new found meaning, each step had a thought of a new purpose. The possibilities were endless, I could do anything and I knew it. As I stepped into the street surrounded by these new feelings of promise and encouragement, I heard a sound, something quite familiar. It was the noise the light made, and it spurred me on. I could see the light in the corner of my eye, and as I turn to look at it, I feel such happiness. The light is total and absorbing and soon it hits me with a force I have never felt before. I blink and I am in the canyon falling into complete darkness once again. 

 My friends are walking away from the restaurant, happily bickering about a new topic of much debate, of this I am sure. One of them looked back at me, walking alone to my home, wondering why I was so quiet today. As her eyes see my form walking in front of the blinding lights of a city bus, she lets out a yell of warning and hopeless desperation. I turn towards and look at the bus as if responding to her warning and get hit, falling and flying under the tires of the bus. When they run to my body, I am not there, but I am falling in to a canyon and deeper into an abyss. I am not scared. I am ready. I am at peace.