The Entheogenic Excursion

After a few tokes and laughs, things seemed to blur together. All I remember was falling back and back, further and further. And even further, as if falling into the night sky and sinking into a soft nebula. Vinyl was out of it from what I could tell. Her bright eyes were glazed and melancholic; her pupils were dancing over her whites like a stone being skipped over a pond of strawberry milk. We didn’t talk, we just took in the evolving surroundings. The bright colors of furniture and carpeting seemed endlessly interesting. Our minds made up patterns as they affixed themselves upon the walls that held us in. The murmuring television hummed with the saintly songs of Philip Glass. A documentary we had flipped on called “Koyaanisqatsi” narrated the evening. It was beautiful.
Our minds began to chatter for what I thought was a minute before I realized we were actually talking to one another. She told me how she was dreadfully sad, hopeless, yet had been unrevealing to her inner troubles. Her kind dwindled and she was homesick, she hadn’t seen her parents since the day she arrived here. She hadn’t seen a single friend of hers since that fateful hour where everything was taken away from her. Then, in a strange cosmic attraction, she found hope in me. Her last, fleeting desperation weighed upon me as her eyes locked into mine. She asked if I could take her home.
Vinyl explained that a story was being spread among the few ponies she encountered. A prophecy in which a pony awake a sleeping exodus. The one will guide the equestrians to the place where they had journeyed from, where they had teleported to Earth. The enduring ponies had repeated the prophecy to her so many times—as if it were a mantra—that she could never forget it. She told me, “When the Sister’s embrace, we must journey towards the beginning, so that we shall not meet our end.”

At any other time, I would have thought of this prophecy as ludicrous, but I was open and willing that night. I felt her emotions weigh on me as it did to her. I felt connected, beyond humanity itself, to her and her alone. It was as if I had found my long lost sister; I soon thought that perhaps she was me from a different plane of existence. The thoughts raddled me from the inside out, and gave me goosebumps along my pale form.

In a somber moment, I felt an awakening within me. Her articulation upon her sweet desire and desperate ambition brought me to a state of unease. I had gained an affinity towards her, but I did not want to go out of my way to bring her home; yet in me I now struggled with this choice. Should I or shouldn’t I take her to this place? What repercussions, on a universal level, will this entail upon me if I choose to help her or not?

Then, as if a shrinking cloud, the thought passed and so did we. Drifting, drifting, drifting into the open blue. Out of body and out of mind, we took no heed to limits. Everything seemed brand new, every problem seemed distant. We didn’t worry, because we had forgotten what worry was. I only knew happiness, and so did she; if only for a moment.

How we went was haunting and satisfying; how we returned, I do not know.

“Fuck,” was the first thing Vinyl heard as she awoke the next morning. The drowsy pony was curled in half-tossed blankets upon Lavender’s bed. The dark form of Lavvy rose up from the sheets, her hair strungout and wild. There was no light to illuminate her features, Vinyl only saw the blurry, silhouette of her new friend. The human pressed the palms of her hands into her eye sockets and rubbed them. She grabbed her flip-phone from the bedside desk and it lit up for a moment and colored her in bleached blues and greens.

“Shit,” she breathed, falling back into bed with a thud that rocked the little horse.

“What’s the matter?” Vinyl lightly asked with strange concern in her voice.

“It’s one o’clock...” Lavvy turned away from Vinyl and snugged herself deeper into the blankets.

Vinyl yawned. “In the morning?”

“No,” Lavvy groaned, “in the afternoon.” She turned in her bed and mumbled, “I hate sleeping in so late. You miss so much of the day to do things.”

“What would you have done if you woke up in the morning?” Lavender was silent. The wheels in her head weren’t quite fast enough this afternoon for such a question.

“I don’t know,” she forced out, unpleased with her answer, “but not sleep in, that’s for sure.”

“Ah,” was all Vinyl replied with, failing to respond appropriately.

The day began after Lavender overcame her shame. Breakfast was at two, and both the human and pony sat at the table eating a well balanced meal of stale corn flakes and over-salted scrambled eggs. They had ate all the bacon yesterday, and because of this the two were a tad depressed.

Vinyl had to grab a phone book to sit on so she could properly reach the table while sitting. Lavender wondered why she had a phone book and where it had come from. Another befuddling thing Lavvy couldn’t quite understand was the way Vinyl was sitting. She peered under the table and looked at the pony’s legs and flank. It just didn’t seem natural to her; then again, Equestrians weren’t Earth-beings to begin with.

Vinyl watched Lavvy do this for a moment before asking, “Why are you staring at my ass?” Lavvy leaned back up and met eyes with her.

“Nothing.”

Vinyl rose an eyebrow, “Does my ass interest you?”

“No!” she sharply answered. “I mean... it does. But not in that way! It’s just...” Vinyl waited patiently, swallowing a mouth full of mashed corn flakes to pass the time. She was honestly interested on why Lavender had done what she did, and waited with a small smile on her face.

“The way you sit, it doesn’t look right.” She took her hands and made strange gestures denoting, “The anatomy, it just doesn’t work.” Vinyl listened intently as she levitated another spoon of cereal to her mouth.

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking. The way I sit is normal, or so I thought.” Lavvy slouched back, defeated.

The pony gave a moment for the odd conversation to blow over until asking, “Do you remember what I told you last night?” Lavvy halted a spoon holding of high fiber substances from reaching her mouth and numbly looked over at the horse.

She lowered the utensil and answered, “You said a lot of things. Shit-” she chuckled, placing an elbow on the table and holding her head up with the palm of her left hand. “-you told me a bunch of stuff. You were rambling on so much that I thought I had slipped you some acid by mistake. Something about the Elements of Harmony, cutie marks, what you would do to Octavia when you found her.” The pony blushed and broke eye contact.

“N-no!” Vinyl fumbled out, stopping the human from continuing. “Remember? About the prophecy, where I wanted to go. I asked you to take me home and you said you would. You promised.” Lavvy began to recall that conversation, a point in which last night she began to tear up, solemnly devoted to taking Vinyl Scratch to where she wanted.

“I did... didn’t I?” Lavvy said in a tone absent of warmth. “Why would I do say that,” she thought self destructively. “Shit, I can’t fucking pull this off. Dammit, I’m going to sound like a real asshole in a few seconds... but I have to tell her...”

“Vinyl,” she sighed, “I can’t.” The pony’s vibrant eyes began to lose their glow, the line of her mouth began to sag.

Lavender continued after an unsteady breath, “I have, like, no money coming in. I need to find a job, my car’s a piece of shit. I can buy you a bus ticket, maybe a plane ticket if I sell some of my remaining dope...” She ran her fingers through her black tangles in frustration. “I just wasn’t thinking last night. I made a rash promise I shouldn’t have made. I made a mistake.” Vinyl was at a loss of words. Her mouth opened, then closed, as if she was about to say something, but stopped at the last moment.

“But...” she finally said, “you promised... You were crying, you were being real with me.”

“And just how do you think I feel?” she snapped, slapping her right hand flat on the table. Vinyl flinched and shut her eyes at the impact. “I have a life! I just can’t run off into the blue with you!” She took a breath in, relaxed her tone, and proceeded, “I know you’re hurt, this whole world is because of the mad, greedy addicts we humans are. If you stick with me, we’ll both eventually get caught and our mutual lives will be ruined.” Lavvy leaned forward and stressed, “Just think in my shoes for a moment. Think of what decisions I have to make.” She crossed her arms and mumbled, “Shit, you don’t even have a concept of shoes, do you?”

Vinyl looked over at her, her expression beckoned weakness and helplessness, the same you might see in child’s face when their parents leave them alone. Lavender looked towards the pony with the vivid mane, a feeling of disappointment washed over her as her eyes made contact with Vinyl’s hunched body. Lavvy’s eyes opened a little wider, taking in what she had just said herself. What if she was Vinyl? What would she do now that her promising hope and newly acquainted friend turned on her? She was alone in a way that Lavvy couldn’t comprehend. She was being hunted, she was a pseudo threat to everyone across the globe. People feared her kind because their governments told them to. Her friend—from Vinyl’s perspective—was almost caught with her, but she protected her. And now she’s being thrown out on the streets, into the wilds again.

Lavender began to remember what the little pony told her about her home. How she described it made Earth look like a place of drear and misery, where hope was a dream or a fairy tale idea. Her world was alive, peaceful, and happy. A place where magic existed and life was an adventure. Lavender was just settling into adulthood, on the precipice of her forty-year journey to retirement. A pattern was beginning to set itself into her life, and her struggle to break free from it was almost impossible without the aid of her fleeting childhood sense of curiosity. The drugs helped, but they would never cure her from the normalities that were soon to come. Again, she felt awakened, her eyes twinkling with insight.

Vinyl, on the verge of a fitful and deep sadness, eased herself from the chair and began walking to the front door, seeing herself out. Lavender watched for a moment, watched as a chance not only to do good, but to break free one last time, plodded away from her. Why she didn’t call out at first was a mystery to her, but as the pony placed her hoof on the knob of the door, she finally spoke up.

“Stop!” she loudly pleaded. She rose from her chair and swiftly approached the mare. Lavender turned Vinyl around and came face to face with her, mere inches separating them.

“I’ll do it,” she murmured painfully. After a moment of brief silence, she emphasized, “I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”

“So,” Vinyl looked away, then back towards the human, “why the change of mind?”

“Because, you asshole, I would feel like shit for doing what I almost did. Safety is overrated. Everyone’s trying to be safe these days, being safe with money, safe with things, safe with themselves. I don’t care for that anymore.” Lavvy shook the pony and joyfully exclaimed, “I want more than that! I want truth! I want justice! I want you home and I want the world back to the way it was. Whether or not I’m going to regret this is beyond me, but before I stop myself again, let’s do this. Let’s get the hell out of here! Today!”

The pony casted a worrisome glance, “Today?”

“Yes!” Lavvy beamed, “Today, let’s go to wherever you teleported from.” Vinyl smiled brightly and suddenly came close to nuzzle Lavvy; the human didn’t know how to react to this and simply pet her mane.

Lavvy leaned away and said, “Wait a minute. Where’s this place at? Do you even know?”

“Sort of,” she hesitated while scratching her noggin. “I know the general area. If I saw a map of your kingdom, I would know.”

Lavvy soon found herself scouring through her closet, searching for a map she may or may not have. She couldn’t quite remember if she had a map of the United States or not; what was odd was that she didn’t know why she would have one to begin with. Like the phone book, she thought about where these things came from or how they found themselves in her abode, it scared her a little bit, but she pushed the thought away before having an existential crisis. After a few minutes, however, she finally found a large, plastic map in the corner of her bedroom closet, wrapped tight in a thick rubber band.

She unrolled it on the kitchen table before the pony, holding its edged down with dirty dishes. Vinyl hunched over and gazed across it intently for a minute.

“There,” she said, placing her hoof down over south-west America. “That’s where we need to go.”

Seeing as it was almost across the continent itself, Lavvy cringed and asked, “Could you be a little more specific?”

“Oh,” she removed her hoof and squinted towards the area she had indicated. “Are-eye-zone-ya” she slowly enunciated. She turned her head towards the human and smiled, “Areeyezoneya is where the portal opened.” Lavender was a bit taken back, not due to the fact that Vinyl Scratch walked from Arizona, but that their destination was a state that was nearly from coast to coast. She knew her mercedes was bound to blow any day now, it had a plethora of problems that she shrugged off to repair. Crossing almost five states with her baby seemed like a surreal thought, something perhaps out of a lucid dream of hers.

She waved her hands in front of her and smoothly llied, “Not a problem. I’ve only been out of state once, but traveling can’t be that difficult. It’s just driving for a really, really long time.” Reality caught back up to her as she pressed the mare for more questions.

Lavender looked towards the map, “Where exactly in Arizona is this place?”

“I’m not sure,” she spoke in a cheery tone. “I’m sure we can ask around.” Lavvy rolled her eyes. Seeing this, Vinyl explained herself, “What I mean is, we’ll find a pony and we’ll ask them. If anything, I know where ponies like to hide from humans.” Lavvy began to feel her stomach tighten into a knot. She knew this was madness, and the stakes were ever increasing with the insanity.

She purged away the thought of backing out again. She just couldn’t do it now that she had gotten up the mare’s hopes again. She peered down at the cream-colored creature, she was rocking excitedly in the chair as she looked at the many routes and highways that lead across the country. A great deal of generosity began to wash over her, which seemed to link her towards the mare. The same feeling occurred when she gave her a bath the second time they met. She couldn’t quite shake the feeling of it, it felt so good to her. She placed a hand on the top of the mare’s head and scratched behind Vinyl’s ears.

She smiled warmly and said, “At this rate, we’re going to need some help, and I know just who to help us.”

Vinyl turned and warned her, “You can’t show me to anyone, remember?”

“No worries, I can trust him. We go way back.” Vinyl thought about and nodded with approval.

“Very well then,” she pleasantly replied, hopping off of the chair and onto the kitchen floor. She looked up at Lavender and said, “A great deal of danger ahead, an itty-bitty chance to succeed; well, what are we waiting for?”