My DNS, a backdoor behind my normalized Archetype Brain. The high altitude rings my ears as every time the flight attendant announced how many minutes are left a hour is added. The baby crying and a Chinese woman with sweat tearing down sneezing into her tissue with full brutal force. I feel her sickness as the “Medicine” kicks again as my body wakes up begging for more. The dark orange lights flicker as bells sing throughout the plane. My perspective is lost as I cry the nightmare to sleep.
Arrival. Night closes in like a curtain as the sunny day reigns over the Colombian airport. The big giant windows reveal the blue sky and Avianca Planes landing or waiting for their departure. I walked pigeon toed to my destination when a man wearing a suit and and with dirty blonde hair scouring from his freckled white face. He snatches my luggage and tells me to come with him. But this time following him and slipping through the labyrinth went quickly and in one second I was pasted into the outside. There I saw a crying middle aged woman with dark brown hair with enough makeup on to cover her old age, a man with a brown shiny leather jacket dirty jeans and a cowboy hat reaching out of his head, and I see a young woman also crying wearing a black dress. All three totems of my past that have haunted me out of a lovely home here with the dark fresh polluted air into a world of hell itself.
“Oh Michael how we have missed you”
My mom says this as she hugs me with a tight grip and does not let go of that jumping frog. But she is going to have to. My sister blocks my vision as she separates my mom and me with her black dress falling as the wind hits it. Not knowing what to say, both of us speechless for different reasons. She looks down and quickly drops the tears and in a bolt looks into my brown dilated eyes and lets out.
“After we heard everything that happened to you in the city, we got scared we couldn’t bare think things happened the way they did. I just-”
“We are just happy you are okay”
My dad interrupts her with his snake tongue. He was the reason I was driven out of this life into another one of survival. The anger clouds and panics my mind, but I release.
“Thank You”
A simple thank you puts smiles in their faces, they are beyond satisfied. The airport is rooted in the center of the city of Bogota making the ride to the family ranch long and tough provoking as I think of the journey I have taken and how being rescued is unreal but unsorted for. I sit and stare at cows, street dogs roaming about, the merchants trying to sell products without care
as they dump their fruit into polluted rivers to wash away the perfection of nature’s gifts. The ranch was not the same one as the one I saw as a child. Back then I had the two innocent eyes that have not seen the outside world, what man was capable of producing for some money to fill their empty white collar pockets.
The car enters and drives up a brick hill as the ranch is pops out with its white concrete wall and brick overlay and windows without glass but metal rods. The car stops as barking drives the sound of the atmosphere. Each three totems talk to me and remind them of their disappointed love in me as they show me the vast house. I open the wooden door and the dog jumps on me with force. My dad restrains and screams at the dog telling him to back off. The dog with his black coat with white overlays and paws frowns in sadness and heads back into the house. I was the dog. My dad reaches out his hand.
“You alright Champ, why you go down that easy huh.”
“Oh leave him be George”
My mom understands as he backs off and returns his hands to the purple cloth in his back pocket. He heads inside to his real son, The Dog. I look inside the house and I don’t see the same one I saw fourteen years ago. My eyes have changed as I have seen the slums under the Brooklyn Bridge, violence, and the worship and craving of a syringe twisted from opium plants grown in the Middle East. This house is a ghost house with non significance.
“Tomorrow your sis will go to Exito Supermarket t buy some new clothes and buy yourself the best dinner you’ll ever have but for right now son, get some rest as a new journey is ahead of you”
My dad informs me as he looks over the family dog, herding. I am trapped with nightmares and bad feelings as my body and mind crave for my medicine. I think of this room I am trapped in, my childhood bedroom. I think of the plane dangling over the ceiling ready to take off into a better place. The closet, toys, the airplane, the drawings, the hidden magazines, the old gaming system, even the toothbrush don’t belong to me. They belong to someone else who died fourteen years ago in the city. As my body lies on the bed only meant to fit my past self I try counting the sheep the dog was chasing. But the number changed and did not land my mental state to relax as I craved. Soon after my body was rejecting itself without the product that makes it happy but makes me miserable. The night becomes an even bigger horror show haunting and plaguing me. I take the pill to keep me walking and to be able to get through the night. A new life awaited me.
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