LSD

I started climbing the stairs. They wound and wound, spiraling through mountains and the atmosphere. I had this burden on my shoulders when I started the climb. The cooler air high above seemed to dissolve it. The stairs wound and wound, passing through caves where strange men and women sat drenched in black lights, their white garments,glowing an eerie purple,flapping gently in the caves' breeze. Far off across the forests I could see the sky, striped horizontally in alternate navy and white.Across each of the white stripes, on top of the navy, sauntered purple elephants in queues, entering from the right edge and leaving from the left edge, edges that really were boundaries of my vision- like entering and leaving across a movie scene- with synchronized steps to beats that made the rhythm in the background syncopated. That's when I noticed the rhythm, a steady hum and beat rising and quivering in the air from somewhere. I stopped my climb and looked up. The stairs would and wound, spiraling through more and more caves until they disappeared into the ragged white clouds. On either side of me, a man and a woman rose from their seat in their caves and opened their yellow eyes. Everything froze. The beat and the rhythm got silenced, the purple elephants stopped walking and my hand, resting on the railing, froze in ice binding me to the stairs. I looked down and up. From every cave on either sides of me, up and below, a man and a woman had risen on either side and stepped to the edge to peer at me with their yellow eyes. And all of a sudden, in unison, they opened their black mouths and started to chant a single syllable, Om, their voices reverberating off their own caves, rising higher and higher, the black lighting shrouding their skin, so that all I could see were purple garments, yellow eyes and gaping holes on their faces from where the Om emanated. As their voices reached a voluminous peak, I shut my eyes only to open them a second later as orange light pierced through my shut eyelids. The sun had suddenly burst through the navy and the white, as if it had been captive behind them, and the elephants, frozen in their tracks, started to burn -purple melted into navy and the navy melted into white which fell from the sky as gigantic hail. As the last elephant melted and the sun won it's war, the Om reached a raging deafening climax, the caves shuddered and the stairs shook and all at once the entire world went quiet and the black lights dissipated the men and women's black skins and yellow eyes. All that was left were white rags floating in the caves' breeze and an equally deafening silence. I drew a long breath and let it out as I looked up. The stairs wound and wound into infinite consciousness.