Inside the Coffee

"You know how on Mondays like these you sometimes can't get out of bed?"
 "Yeah, I don't sleep well over weekends.  Too much time out drinking," I grumbled.  A cafe at 6AM made for a strange place for a date.  Aside from us, there were a bunch of salarymen lined up out the door for their morning pick me up.  Everyone around us speaking in hurried Japanese was starting to give me a headache.  A band of iron wrapped around my head, pulling and pushing behind my eyes.  The pain was radiating towards my neck and all I wanted to do was take a nap, but time with Aya was too precious a commodity to refuse any of her invitations; even bizarre ones like this.
 "I don't mean that.  When you literally cannot move because the air is too heavy and the sky is falling down."
"You mean when its raining."
"Well maybe.  It's usually the rain inside my, though, that brings the sky down on top of me," she explained, taking a sip of coffee.  The way she was such a coffee snob was kind of a turn on.  She always took it black so she could discern the quality of it.  She could almost tell the difference between African and Chilean arabica beans.  Or she was a very lucky liar.  It's had to say.
 "Are you going anywhere with this?"
 She had fallen into staring absently at the space above my head.  She was one of those strange I-can-see-your-aura types and she would sometimes fall into these strange revelries only to tell me how purple I was today and totally derail the conversation.  
 "Oh, right.  On those days, sometimes if you leave this world and come back, you feel better."
"Are you high?"
She giggled.  "No, I wouldn't drop acid on a Monday.  It's a Wednesday afternoon kind of deal if anything."
"So are we talking aliens... or what."
"Oh just the world inside a coffee cup."
"I think you're high."
"Well I think you've got those eyes that don't really see."
That was a favorite of hers when I didn't understand her pipe dreams.  If I didn't love the way her hair gently draped itself over her shoulders or how her eyes always had this lazy, curious gleam to them we would've been over months ago.  Plus she didn't talk about bizarre shit all the time.  Just most of it.  
 "Enlighten me."
 "Well this is pretty cheap coffee and the mug was made in some Chinese factory, so we'll end up in a kind of sketchy part of town.  I know my way around, though, we could go."
"How?"
She took hold of my wrist, surprisingly tightly.  "Oh just by diving in.  Stare into the  cup, I'll handle the rest."
The pitter patter of rain on the windows and the arhythmic babble near the cash register slowly melted into the same, soft rushing.  The surface of the coffee glimmered in the fluorescent lights, blocking the view of its cinnamon colored core.  The steam hovering over the surface and dissipating into the air seemed to be sucking me in.  The way walking along a road at night after a summer rain can drag you into deep fog before you realize it, making you question which way is forwards and from which way you even came.  
That tunnel vision with a gleaming black mirror far ahead of me.  Of us, I could feel Aya gripping onto me harder and harder, but I couldn't see a thing.  Inside of a coffee-scented cocoon, the thick walls of wisps of steam hung all around us, threatening to melt away; slowly collapsing and dragging us towards the shimmering dark.  Now the cafe was out of reach, a world I couldn't sense.  I wasn't sure if I had died and collapsed to the floor or if I was still talking to Aya using convoluted metaphors to discuss her major depressive episodes.  It was Monday, wasn't it?  Late at night or early in the morning...
Our 6 month anniversary had been a week ago if it was still Monday.  With a girl like Aya, you had to celebrate every month, even though typically I was the type to spurn the idea of a monthly anniversary.  It always seemed so silly and impatient until I started dating the kind of girl who bakes cheese cakes pretty much every Thursday night during prime time TV and who wakes herself up by jumping in and out of reality.  
Then we hit the black.  Aya took the lead, her black hair billowing out behind her as we dove through into an intense heat.  I couldn't breathe.  She kept pulling on my wrist, but the oppressive heat and solid black around us was wilting my body.  I felt myself melting away, slowly fading into this new something.  I had often watched the glistening ribbons of sugar dissolving in tea, but only now could I sympathize with them and their bending, swirling, vanishing dance.  I was aware of nothing except a pressure somewhere pulling insistently forward.
"Oh good, you didn't even pass out."  Aya was floating in front of me, still holding on to my wrist.  "My first time through it was better coffee, so the door wasn't so thick.  I thought for a second you were going to die for sure!"  
"Great," I said.  I wanted to throw up, but wasn't sure where my stomach was anymore.  We were suspended in something and we weren't breathing, but we didn't need to breathe anyway apparently.  I slowly felt my mass welling up again.  
"Yeah, would've been a downer.  We're almost, there, though."  
Onward we pushed again, deeper into the murk that had taken the place of the steam.  There was a simple clarity to everything, but like diving into the sea, the light began to bend and jump and make it difficult to see ahead or behind.  So very hot.  
Then shapes and colors beyond the black began to draw closer.  Stark, wiry forms in neon oranges and blues.  There was yellow and there was red around us, the wire creatures vibrating rapidly and generating high-pitched, spicy sounds.  Sometimes they would make a lower, guttural sound that sent a chill down my spine.  Surrounding by these sparking, quivering, mercurial beings I knew we had left our reality.  Aya was talking to a mass of bright purple strings that hung like a jellyfish's tentacles from a rough red ball lined with bumps and spikes.  The strings would quiver like wet noodles and Aya was dancing too, making weird high pitched whirring.  Apparently theirs was a language human beings could learn after all.  
While Aya was impersonating a screaming eel, I took in the strange landscape around us.  There seemed to be six different horizons, unevenly spaced from each other, and every side of the prism littered with projections and colored some bright color.  We were floating over the green one, but all around us the wire creatures seemed unbound by any laws of physics to say along one horizon.  Their 2-dimensional bodies would warp and bend for a moment and return to themselves, taking up some mass again on the new plane.  
She stared me straight in the eyes when she let go.  I still have no idea what she was trying to say by that, she won't give me an honest answer.  Something about that look said she wanted me to die, but more than that she wanted me to survive to surprise her.  She wanted to see what would happen.  And then there was something broken inside there.  In the coffee cup world, she had a bright fleck of gold in her eye that roared about an intense rage born of bottomless despair.  That moment when a mother bear, already full of bullets, transcends death to protect her cub and becomes a demon.  Or when the lightning cracks before bringing down enough rain to make it hard to see your hand in front of your face.  Hundreds of those cataclysms in a tiny gold spot that drifted around her iris in lazy rotations, thundering and flickering like Jupiter, made heavier by its own boundlessness.

Cheap cup of coffee,
two people jump in and there is
only sound and fury.

If you've ever broken the sound barrier, I imagine you know the feelings I had in my skull and stomach as I ricochetted from purple to orange to green to orange to pink and always towards a hazy, distant tearing apart in space.  Greeting a new year with a new skin, swimming in water so deep as to confuse my sense of surface and of bottom.  It was remarkably horrifying.  I was reminded of that concept of birth trauma, that we all drag around a deep-set misery from when we arrived officially into existence.  
And she dove into this regularly.  Willingly.    
 I felt inclined to explode.  An enormous pressure building up in my head and my feet and everything in between, torn between inhaling and exhaling.  The tastes of morning, afternoon, and night all flooded me with their salts and sweets and grease.  I found myself staring through the mirrors when I fell and kept on falling.  My reflection as unmoving as ever while everything inside me pitched and churned, a fiery, angry serpent trapped in a plastic grocery bag.
So I rode the thrashing waves.  Past the shrieking electric lines, the whirring clouds, and the ubiquitous buzzing.  And somewhere in all the mind-bending and bizarre  sounds that I had wanted to stop, a soft thrumming picked up.  The shapes grew longer and less sharp, the colors around me mellowing back into a uniform brown; the many horizons and colored planes melting back to a rich coffee tunnel.  
My skin felt like it was being sheared apart in tiny lines, a many flavored pain coursed through me, now stinging, then burning.  The coffee was slipping into me, dying my bones dark and fragrant; sparing me the embarrassment of leaving behind a Hollywood chalk skeleton.  No sooner than did I decide there was a pleasure in the melodic whirring and blurring than I was again in steam and back sitting across the table.  My head was spinning and felt drowsy and on-edge.  
She swallowed, her eyes wide and vacant.  "Yeah, that was a bad part of town."
I stared at her.  
"Well you proved yourself at least.  Was it nice?"
"It was, but this isn't a Zelda game or something!  You could've killed me you know."
"No.  They would've thrown you back out with some nasty burns on your hands and a burnt coffee smell that wouldn't wash out of your hair for a week, but you wouldn't die."
"You could've said so."
"I guess," she laughed.  A strangely hollow, shimmering laugh that reminded me she was only living in reality as a part-time gig.  "But you wouldn't hear the music if you didn't think you could die.  That first time is the best time."
"Well then I'll leave it at that."
"But you must venture into Tea and gather more musicians to wake me from my enchanted, caffeine-addict's slumber."
I couldn't help smiling.  I couldn't help holding her a hand a little tighter.  The white noise of the cafe rushed back in over us, but somehow we could swim through it.  So close to the surface of it all our ears stung with ringing and all was silence.
"Is the world strange or is it us?"  I found myself whispering.  A frigid shadow was welling up in my shoes like water.  
She wasn't trapped in the whisper-sphere, that bubble in space where everyone is whispering and not a single person knows why.  "There's no reason it has to be one or the other I suppose.  If you want to be weird, blame yourself.  If you want to be lame, blame the world.  If you believe there's beauty watching water boil or feeding koi, just be happy it is how it is."