oh god. what the fuck.

you see what you can wedge into the pressure crack in the concrete. it requires a certain talent for contortion. a talent you happen to possess. oh god, you say. what the fuck. but there is no prayer in you. the words are lubricant, the mechanism by which you move past what is before you.

you fold your body along its pleats. beneath the concrete, you suspect there is a second version of the world. like this one but inverted. you are drunk. everyone is loud. the man who smells like burning sage and leather has been following you around the party. you have been longing for a quiet place to fold into.

so you begin the origami. you make yourself a series of adjacent parallels, like a collapsible tent pole. soon, most of your body is in the second world. standing there feels like falling. your feet touch no earth. you will learn to walk on your hands.

finally, your head disappears. all that remains is your arm, attached to your hand, attached to the gnarled length of rebar which once held the apparatus together. you are suspended there, perceiving darkness. another of the second world’s inversions. if up is down and dark is light, then right could be wrong, and death, life, and memory everything you’ve forgotten.

you wish you could forget how the building took on the expansiveness of a banquet hall, or of the outdoors. you disliked it, not for its associations, but for its lack of defined parameters. for how the man kept finding you, his loud aroma reeking of smudge sticks or his ever-ripening shoes.

you do not let go of the rebar.

in fact, you hold it tighter. from the first world, you hear the muffled echoes of their chants. the world beneath you beckons. it will be the same, you think, but only after you let go. you think the second world can’t touch you if your hand is still in the first.

you hang there in the darkness, no longer in the first world, not quite in the second, the words you’ve uttered throughout your descent slowly filling in the cracks. everything is behind you: the man, the cavernous room, the concrete, and the people. their strangled cries carve patterns into the concrete.

oh god, you say, as though it should fit into the room. what the fuck, you answer with the semantics of dust. condensed to your most finite point, a stillness overcomes you, a balance between your hand and the absence of your mind.

you open your eyes in anticipation. a canvas painted black. after the eternity of this evening, this is the place you have been longing for.