Celebrating the year of the birth of conciousness

So I’ve been having out of town company this week. Once a year occasionally twice, Ersyla comes to town to see her Mom. When she does she usually stays here.

We met the first day of 8th grade, (that’s 1976 in case you’re wondering). She asked me if I wanted to play checkers, which I don’t really know how to play to this day. But for some reason I was winning and she called me a witch. Which at the time was one of the best epithets she could have used so instead of fighting we ended up friends.
That was a crazy year, highlights of which include my friends and I eating and rubbing on ourselves so much Jimpson Weed we were perpetually green. It’s a damn good thing we didn’t know it’s the root that does it, or we would all be dead. I keep hearing stories about groups of dead and fucked over children down south because of it.
Another crazy story is me and Jeff and Mikey, stoned on our asses, decide to make something called “tripping wax”. So we put a pan of wax on the stove, which of course catches fire, I, stoned and clueless, throw a huge bowl of dirty water from the sink onto it, Mikey’s holding the pan, and va-whoosh the whole thing explodes in a fire ball. We spend the next 3 hours standing on chairs to mop the ceiling, scraping wax off the floor, and feeding Mikey codeine from Jeff’s Dads medicine chest.
Then there was the time, (I was just thinking about this the other day,) that Jeff, Robbie and I sparked up in the back of the public bus. The driver a very big, very wrathful, black woman came down on us like Melnijor. Scared the shit out of us and sent us running for our lives.

That was also the year I dosed for the first time, that was with Ersyla. I don’t remember so much about the whole but I do remember towards dawn we ended up at the lake by the skinny dipping hole. We climbed out onto the old dead branch to just finally sit and rest after the long, long night. The sun was coming up and the fog was rising from the lake.
In the fog I could see the naiads forms drifting upwards from the darkness of the water to eventually be rendered invisible in light. I sat in this place outside of time watching these beautiful male and female entities rise and disperse. There is a female one that I can see in my minds eye, as clear and real as at that very moment, immutable, immortal.

Earlier that year, Ersyla and I, walking the track at the edge of the woods in the sunlight. We are walking along a 10 foot high hedge covered in yellow flowers. I remember the green grass on the track, the brown, gray and black trunks of the trees on the left. The sun beating down making everything shine and sparkly. Intensifying the yellow of the flowers in the hedge. Then we begin to focus on, that fact that the whole hedge is being tended by fairies. We stopped and stood and watched and watched and watched. Another small eternity outside of time. Finally we just walked away.

After high school Ersyla moved to San Francisco. For years and years, every now and then, my phone would ring or I’d find myself calling and the question was; “You remember right? It’s really true isn’t it?” And the answer is always yes.