Everything Is Within The Cloud

When he woke the room was shrouded in a sharp floral orange. He was dissatisfied with the state of the process and had resolved to move through it as quickly as he could.

The taste of the past still came quickly to his tongue. He remembered when the cloud was red, when his life was saturated by an incomparable sense of desire, warmth, and love. It hadn't been very long. The doors of his mind had barely begun to creep shut.

This day would begin like most. He would go to the same place he had gone, and the cloud would render it new once more. How will the familiar people and places appear through the sharp, floral orange, he wondered.

"What do we look like today?," his friend asked.

"I'm sorry, I've just woken up" he said.

"Aha!" the barista said, "twelve ounces of press will have to do, then."

"It will do perfectly," he said. "I'm trying to get this orange to become something else. Something of my choosing this time."

"I don't follow," the barista said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, "I'm trying to take control of my life. For a long time I thought I had it under control, but it turns out I don't. Different sensations are constantly flowing in and out of one another, pooling and dissipating around me at all times."

"I feel you. My life largely just happened," the barista said. "I never thought corporate training would transform me into the reckless business owner I am. My life has become a steadily rotating rainbow, the smell of rain and all. I like your sensual metaphors, I thought I'd give them a try," he concluded with a smile.

Our hero appreciated the barista's sympathy. He had been speaking in this sensual way for so long that he didn't question it anymore. People often commented on it, remarking on his ability to identify each moment with a color, a smell, a taste, a sound, and a feeling. But the complexity of his moments had very little to do with originality or creativity.

He had literally experienced life from within an ever shifting cloud.

As far as he knew the cloud had always been there. His sensuousness had always threatened to swallow him. He feared he would forever be gawking at the abyss inside him. He feared that someday he would endlessly tumble inward, breaking bones and puncturing skin on objects distilled from lust and wont.

The cloud changed as he went down into himself.

The cloud was thick and misty. Yellow. Tart. Arousing.

A period of blank free fall. Quiet sobriety with a hint of pale blue.

Another layer of mist. A bright purple, a subtle sweetness, a dank human aroma, intense frustration.

Purple fades to red. Feelings of warmth overwhelm him as he begins to taste blood, smell citrus, and hate himself.

In his life he saw two paths. Down one path he could go deeper and deeper into himself. He could go down into himself forever, into an endlessly changing sensuous free fall.

The other path was darker. It contained more people. It contained less sensuousness and more relationships.

He set out from the cafe, heat and energy in hand, bright green mist following him. It was time to perpetuate the routine that he knew someday would end. He wasn't sure what green meant this time. Often green came, surprisingly enough, with feelings of inadequacy and intimations of bravery. Unfortunately, however, there was never a clean correlation between color, sound, taste, smell, or emotion.

He could recall times when a bright orange-red came along with the most intense lust and the taste of burnt metal. But metallic tastes could also come along with greens and blues. Reds could come with sadness, thoughts of death, the most intense fantasies, the most vivid tastes.

There was no pattern to the cloud, no stability, no trace of cause and effect to be found. Just a forever shifting set of sensations.

Today the walk to work came with a cloud of bright green that coincidentally tasted of green apple, smelled of spinach and broccoli, and felt like grass. He hoped the coincidence somehow signified a new unity in his life, the beginning of a more stable pattern.

But he knew it was just chaos again, just another accidental alignment that would quickly fade once more into meaninglessness.