The world went black. I could still think, but I couldn’t see, feel, hear or smell anything. I was essentially a brain in a jar. That guy in the Metallica “One” video. I was just a random singular thought process surfing the universe. But I could feel a presence next to me. It was soft, warm and comforted my heart. I could tell it was Jameson. I couldn’t feel her, I could just sense her and it told me everything would be okay in just a second.
The world came back to me like a freight train. I felt like the times when I was a little kid and I would spin around the living room in circles and then sit down really fast and see the room spin around like a top for a few seconds.
The first thing I saw when the light came back to the world was Jameson’s soft eyes staring back at me from underneath the cover of my body. I smiled at her and placed my hands on my back, ran a quick scan for any wounds I may have brought back from the other side with me.
“Holy shit fuck. That worked?!” Jesse’s voice cracked from behind me.
I rolled off of Jameson, my body drained of just about any kind of energy. I laid on my back, stared up at the blazing sun of the desert until I felt Jameson place her soft hand into mine.
*
Jesse dropped Jameson and I off at my parents’ house. I couldn’t have been more relieved about what had just happened, but that didn’t mean I still didn’t have 100 things to explain to my parents that I wouldn’t be able to.
We walked through the front door. I expect to hear my mom scream or my dad start to yell as soon as I walked into the lightless living room and smelled the familiar odor of the Parchman family home seep into my pores.
But nothing. We stood in my parents’ nearly dark living room alone. I took off for the kitchen counter where my mom always left a note if she was going to leave one.
I didn’t find a note, but I did see my mom’s purse. Turned over on its side, her maroon purse spilled its guts all over the soft blue tile of the kitchen counter. One distinct item which laid just outside of the lips of the purse stood out to me. It was a little vial of Oxy-Gen fluid.
It was half empty. 