It comes rushing in like fire in a dry season. The first thing he notices is the noise. A low rumble starting off in the distance. It grows and it grows quickly. Just like a hungry fire - ready to consume everything around it as quickly and hungrily as it possibly can.
Lennie covers his ears with his hands and then then with forearms, pressing them as hard as he is able to against the rushing sound of the drug roaring through his bloodstream. The sound becomes unbearable, so much so then he had ever been used to before - In the past Lennie had done a fifth of the amount he had just done and he has begun to flail and convulse. The 'funky chicken' his mates had called it.
Lennie had vowed this would never happen to him again.
This time was even worse.
He had not had a chance to properly stop the bleeding on his arm and what he did not know had saved his life. The excess poison and magic that might have killed him had he forces it to stay inside his body was now bleeding away and dissipating into the air of the room around him. It that it was not a mainline he had hit with his narcotic magic mixture, but an artery. Had he hit a regular vein it would have killed him and that would have been that. The Devil had not told him this and it was pure blind luck that he was able to inject into his artery and not a vein. Luck favours the stupid, the lovers and of course children. Lennie was not a child anymore but he was in love and he was stupid to try such a dangerous thing. A trick the most seasoned of magicians and charlatans and witches of any order or class would shy away from as stupid and unnecessarily dangerous. In fact no one had ever survived the ordeal - although it was unlikely Lennie would have listened to warnings even if he had received them. He was just that type of person.
Lennie's hands moved across his face in an attempt to keep his now imploding brain from leaking out onto his face and the room spun and swam and roared around him and he began to convulse and twitch. He saw his hands were coated with his own blood - it gushed out of his nose, his ears, his eyes and flowed across his face as if he were in a shower, casually rinsing off the day's dirt and grime.
In this case it was not the city's filth he was washing off but time and space and everything that kept him tethered to the here and now. To the the reality that existed beneath his neighbour's music and the faded hardwood floors his feet were touching.
He felt the whole world shake and cast him off - repulsed by his very presence, his very existence. Lennie prayed to fall unconscious - he prayed that he be spared the sight of his own body turning inside out. Lennie watched, distracted by the roar of his own blood and the smell of apples and cinnamon, as his hands began to fade into nothingness. His forearms disappearing and his black t-shirt and jeans deflating as if there were never anything inside them at all. His clothing passed through him and fell crumpled onto the couch and floor. As if they had been casually tossed aside by a sloppy and uncaring undresser. Perhaps in haste to prepare for bed or to meet a lover waiting for him in bed. This would have been so much better than what was actually happening as Lennie was ceasing to exist, his being falling out of sinc with this reality, his consciousness cut loose from his body - his very essence, what theologians have referred to as the soul - Lennie surmised, now acutely aware and bemused by the experience of becoming nothing but thought. The rushing sound carrying him out of his apartment like a loose wind caught between two sheets drying on an old clothesline on a windy and warm November afternoon.
Lennie felt his mind disintegrate and reintegrate - he felt his body die and be reborn on levels and places he never dreamed even existed. He was now gone from this plane of existence and was travelling well beyond human expectation. For a second or maybe even two Lennie unformed and stayed that way - almost lost forever on the winds of birth and rebirth - without an anchor Lennie would be funneled into a new life and be reborn into a new life into a world far beyond his own. His pain and suffering and love and sacrifice would have all been in vain because he was unable to concentrate on the one reason he was doing this in the first place.
At the last possible second Lennie heard the voice of fate calling out to him. It was Jane and his soul twisted and turned and spiraled towards the sound of her voice. Jane wanting Lennie to save her - not wanting her love for Lennie to become as meaningless as air.
Lennie's mind seizes this thought and driven by the sounds of the roaring around him begins to migrate through the storm of unbeing and lost moments - as this is where - Lennie discovers as his consciousness soars past them - this is where they all end up.
Breaching time and space and a wafer thin dimensional wall, Lennie arrives where he has intended on going. He has gone back to yesterday. He does not yet realize that it is not his yesterday that he has arrived in.
He arrives naked and skids across a hard paved surface, producing a painful bit of road rash along the left side of his body. He rolls to a stop, breathing heavy, savouring his first breath of air in this new world. He acknowledges the pain he feels in his heart and along the strip of raw flesh that landing in this dark and dismal alley has produced and then he starts to cry.
He crys tears of hope.
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