The Dharma Concerto

Dharma: an aspect of truth or reality. All dharmas are forms of emptiness.

T. was all eyes, wild and vivid like there was something complex and mysterious just beyond those tiny blue eyes of hers! Lured each and every one of us to her like little druggie moths to a flame. We were like her favorite collection! We were the nonsensical entertainments of youth! Every day, we would joust for her. Anything that could win us attention, or special winnings with her. She had known us since childhood, and together, we made many amicable aspirations: whether in recording music or recording the destruction of our formidable minds. She loved each and every one of our muddy personalities, lifestyles, moods, and attitudes with fierce, amorous love! And we would have basically done anything for her. Death and all. We could decompose our very energies and soul! We were totally fucking doomed off the rip.

She did not understand the rapid pace of things, how everyone was always moving, clocking in-and-out, wasting loser-life on the pointless machinations of work. T. never worked a day in her short, little life, but always seemed to have bands upon bands on her! I know this because when I had come over the other day, she was raining down hundreds of the twenties. I was never envious of her because she always took care of everybody, including me. I had always considered myself the newb of the group, coming upon their awesome, idiosyncratic secret-lives at the very end. All of my paintings are scrawled throughout her apartment. All of their shitty tattoos were done by yours truly, so I felt I held a special position in the swarming complexities of their galaxy. They had accepted me as permanently as skin-ink! I hadn't grown up with them but felt just like family. T. smiled and roared each and every time I tattooed her. Everyone always laughed. Sometimes she would kick me hard in the ribs whenever I got too excited with the weight of my needle-hand. I smiled destructively!

T. never believed in the wrongful ideologies of the human condition. She was totally disgusted about the slow way society was heading down: that unavoidable, unavoidable, unavoidable infinite drain! She was very smart and knew that there was no way of saving the world. So one day, she randomly called us: consisting of Tyler and DeeBoy, and myself. She scooped each and every one of us in her tattered grey minivan (given to her by her new step-dad. Award-winning!) We rollicked down I-4 just before 11:00 A.M. T. played her horrible trap music for an entire horrible hour (everyone bobbing along catastrophically, except me). She suddenly turned off her radio and told us the game plan, the true purpose of our clandestine trip: we were on our way to Cocoa Beach. It was December by now, chilly as all get out! None of us were very enthusiastic about the two-and-a-half-hour drive to a cold-ass, wind-chilled beach. But we were very enthusiastic about something the other part she had left out.

DRUGS!

DRUGS. DRUGS. DRUGS!

She had scored our preferred drug-of-choice (or "D.O.C. YEAH-YOU-KNOW-ME"). T. had the ganja. Tyler, perc 30's. DeeBoy had his cocaine. As for me, Xanax, Xanny, bars, bars, bars! Do. Not. Judge. Us.

T. always drove with the windows down as she chain-smoked her Pall Malls and played her favorite Lil Peep album, Hellboy. Her dark black hair blew wildly in the chilly afternoon wind. T. was consistently, perpetually stoned, her mind was always fervent and very, very sharp! From time to time, she would speak to us in that cool esoteric colloquy that she held. More yelling than anything else. Everyone always understood whatever she was saying, except for when it came to me. She turned her pretty little head toward me and shouted sometime to me over drug-fuelled Peep music.

"As long as I'm alive, I'ma die, baby. Time flies on the highway, and I've high since last Friday. Cocaine in your bitch brain."

She wanted to be luminous, devastatingly invisible in the beauty of it all! And soon enough, we stopped worrying about the trip, because the plethora of chemicals in our warm bodies made everything just as illuminating. Our understandings were full of radiance, purpose, and truth. (Only DeeBoy was filled with emptiness; a constant proclivity due to his cocaine usage). She drove so fucking fast that I swore if not for a large amount of benzo's tromping through my system, I'd have a fucking heart attack. We trusted her to the max!

At ninety miles an hour, the hustling world disappeared. T. smiled as her consciousness expanded. She was very calm and ego-lost. She punched it close to a hundred, one-twenty, one-twenty five. Everything around her splendor was throbbing with energy. She flowed with ultimate life. Nothing else in the world mattered to her, because she had us with her.

We were never the same after the accident.

Tyler and Deeboy would soon follow her existential wave-soul down, down, down that infinite drain.

I was the last one. I was always the God damn newbie.