Book One In The Ahh-Ness Of Things Series: April & Donnie were once inseparable, but now almost six years have passed since she left NYC. What if April O'Neil could set the record straight, once & for all! The only girl down enough to chill with the...
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At this moment the universe is upside down. Think about it for a second. No one can explain how we see the world the way we do. We see everything right side up, but what we don't know, is we are all walking on the ceilings, & gravity is rising up to meet us. At this moment; life, love, reality itself was a convex lens & I was falling skyward. Floating across a creamy sapphire lake under an endless night sky of shooting stars, on a turtle shell large enough to sit upon. My mind tried to make sense of the current state of things & yet it was like all logic held for me anymore, was senseless waste of miracles.
I couldn't swim in the water because it was poisonous, & cold enough to stop my human heart. As lovely as it was, with its ethereal glow from within, it was full of heavy toxins from mineral deposits & algae. The "night sky" was an array of miniature bio luminescent predators; hunting & running from one another. The turtle who carried me across the depths of the nightmare dreamland, was my ex boyfriend. The very reality of this fantasy was the convex view from the world just beneath the city of Manhattan. The stratosphere over head where I could gaze into the darkest heaven; the ground beneath your feet.
I sat on top of Donnie's back as we made our way over the cavern pool, to an ominous entrance like a gaping mouth, in the distance. Wherever he was taking me; he had said was just beyond the underwater tunnel we were approaching. Its archway only a few feet above the water's surface. I had thought what he wanted to show me, was the affect of the cave itself. To our confusion, we now knew we had literally very different perceptions of one another.
I thought of the irony in this as I traced the intricate details of his shell, under my finger nails, while he swam beneath me. The geometric formations that pieced together the carapace were now like illuminated layers of living agate; rhyolites, grossular, heliotropes, chrysoprase. His blood, moving near the surface, ran between them like fluid carnelian. I was careful not to rest my hip too heavily or dig my heels into him, as I knew he could feel all of it. I lay down & rested to one side, my arm beneath my head. I ran my hand over the interlocking segments down his spine & thought of how they had been like scars running down Berni's back. How they were inherited traits in Yoshi, even without a turtle shell of his own.
The water began to lap up around him & I knew we were in the last moments of traveling through this wondrous world. I watched, though I laid down to sleep, as the lights began to fade & the stars blinked out one by one from my sight; leaving me to lay in black silence. The jewels that adorned my friend were now put out of their haunting light.
With the tunnel near inches from my face, in total darkness, I had only my thoughts to keep me from claustrophobic panic. I reassured myself Donnie wouldn't let me get hurt. He wouldn't let the water lift him & pummel me into the rock face. I tried to think calming thoughts. I closed my eyes & held tight to one of the raised scutes along the crescent of his back. I thought of how astoundingly ornate he actually was, how I still couldn't comprehend the incredible sight of him in the cave minutes before. It was as if a simple moth against the bark of a tree, revealed itself a pulchritude splendor for only a moment, before your eyes; as moths tend to do. Never minding itself to be anything more than a simple, powdery moth.
