Cloud Rage

by Lisa Fagaly

Existence is a drift. The more I’m left to drift the more pleasant I find the day. It’s not listless. There’s purpose in my activity, there’s a semblance of direction and action and intention, but the pace and the motion are calm, hardly noticeable. I like that. Not being noticed. No one sees me unless I cast a shadow across their day. Then they see and, depending on the day, are either happy or pissed. I wouldn’t say I’m ominous but some people definitely don’t like me. And sometimes I go an entire day without seeing anyone. Those are my favorite, because the world is just so beautiful unpopulated.

I’m unsure when it starts to happen or where it even comes from, but at some point, on some days, I start to get heavy. It’s visceral, a slow accumulation. The air gets thick and sticky and collects everywhere: on me, inside me, against me. It’s overwhelming, sure, but I feel bigger and stronger, there’s power to it. I’d call it confidence but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s one of those feelings that is so dense with experience that it’s almost impossible to articulate.

So I drift, still calm, but as the heaviness increases I start to feel a buzz, an accumulating buzz. Initially it’s good, like being drunk or high or seeing the person you hope to love, your entire being just feels ‘on’ and the world is sharper and clearer than usual. It’s pleasant but nerve-wracking because I know what happens next, I know that with the heaviness comes something that I hate. It’s this feeling of power and energy that becomes difficult to control as it intensifies. There’s all this activity within me, right in the center, my molecules shooting back and forth and the buzz intensifying. There’s nothing expressly unpleasant about it but it’s, I guess, uncomfortable. It’s the growing understanding that soon I’ll be completely out of control. Do you know how weird it feels to not be able to control how out of control you’re about to be? Hurtling towards an oblivion and incapable of preventing it? It’s misery.

But as it continues, as I let go, it starts to feel incredible.

Soon there’s nothing else but the frantic pinging of molecules through me and around me. The heaviness becomes comforting in its familiarity and the buzzing turns into such an intoxication that I forget how it feels to feel any other way. But the best part is that soon I’m not alone. As I continue down this path of potential annihilation I find my friends, all having the same experience, each growing heavy and beyond control, each living with the internal frantic pinging of their own matter growing furious with simply existing and forcing transformation at an increasingly rapid pace. We’re all abuzz with molecular fury.

You never know when it’s going to crack, but at some point we simultaneously break open. The chaos is spectacular. The deluge is unrelenting. It’s a party and all of us are at our most effusive. The sound is deafening as the crack and crash of our colliding molecules fills us and explodes away from us. For hours this can last. We morph into one being and fill the surrounding space with our violent energy. It’s not meant to be destructive but it can be. The force we whip up is uncaged and unruly and we’ve been known to cause damage where none was intended. But there’s no stopping and no regret. Acting as one our speed sometimes increases, but sometimes the intensity is too overwhelming and we get stuck in one spot.

Eventually though, through the blinding enthusiasm of the event, once we’ve used up every ounce of accumulated energy, we find that we’ve left each other. Coming out of it and realizing you’re alone is the absolute worst part. And there’s nothing left to do, there are no good-byes. You’re back to drifting. You’re back to calm. You exist and you wait for the next batch of heaviness to return and fill you up. You wait for the next party, for the next frenetic encounter with your drifting, listless friends.

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Lisa is constantly lost in her imagination and bewildered by what she finds there. She encourages imaginative expression of all forms and, of course, cloud chasing.