A drunken pilgrimage to the world’s end

This was a day that felt like it was meant to be prophetic. I’ve followed synchronicity in my life. I’ve chosen to believe that coincidence plants itself deliberately as a sign that you are following your current. Every pattern emerging, every strange sequence of events or numbers, is a nod of approval from an otherwise apathetic universe. This was not something I had experienced before though. There was no pattern, no discernible meaning, just a heaviness woven into its fabric. A slowly burning aethyr.

We woke up late into that afternoon when the sun was already beginning to turn golden and weary. I drank my morning coffee at 5PM, smoked a cigarette, and meandered outside toward the wine bar. It was July 3rd, so the most obnoxious patrons were readily identified by their American flag clad regalia. We avoided them at a table in the corner, with a bottle of wine and three Canadians. The next few hours took us to the bottom of that bottle and the filters of a lot of cigarettes. Our next destination was a dilapidated goth club in a defunct Hotel. We lingered in the stairwell smoking cigarettes until we tired of it.

Go home? Go on an adventure? The night was warm. We could make it to Belle Isle by sunrise and fall asleep on the beach. Walk across the whole breadth of the city and sleep in the sun and dirt. I could see it in his eyes as he spoke. I was afraid of the city at night and I wanted the safety of my bed and locked doors, but the curiosity was intoxicating. Could we do it? Just wander? Just walk? Make it to the beach and sleep like wild dogs on trampled grass? Could I defy my cautious aversions? Would I allow myself the freedom and abandon to live? Share this one moment that we would remember forever because on this night, this whole city was ours. We owned it. We would be the only souls in these streets witnessing something that we may never see again. He spoke of the ephemeral as if he knew something about it that I did not. We stumbled hand-in-hand into the expansive night, and the opposite direction of home.

Detroit is a very peaceful place at night. Sprawled and imposing, with its neon casinos glimmering over the river, but no one exists. The streets are gold and black and empty for miles. He could probably feel my heartbeat racing in my hand, and there were moments when I wanted to turn around and go back home. We didn’t. I bit my tongue. We kissed and the night looked like a pool of ink, no end between the sky and the starlit river. We talked excitedly all night, stopping for cheap coffee and to watch the sky blanch. Joked about the cult we should start now that I had found my mate. How I should keep him chained up and fed a diet of cocktails and Viagra. How he was the beast I would ride until the world ends.

Around 6:30AM we made it to Belle Isle. Our drunken quasi-spiritual pilgrimage was almost concluded, but just begun. Looked down to my feet and noticed that I had been stepping on hundreds of tiny winged insects. All dead and stuck to the ground waving their bisected legs like antennae. The sky was beautiful and the water looked like a sheet of clouded glass. Wild flowers were blossoming and the air was humid and floral. We walked on. I looked down to my feet again, and saw that now we were walking over dead fish. We did our best not to step on them, and made some joke about what kind of Omen this was. We walked on.

Now there was music in the air, thin and faint like a perfume. I could make out what looked like a baptism in the distance. Dozens of figures in long black robes and crowns wading into the water and singing hymns from the shore. No one spoke. No one looked at us. We walked further on, and the sound of music drifted further and further behind us. Still gripping his hand, we made it over a little bridge, through a little tree-shrouded path, and toward the beach we planned to fall asleep on. There was something light and ebullient about the way my chest felt. Maybe it was joy, maybe it was sleep-deprivation.

I made the decision to peer into the bushes for some reason, and saw something white and bristled. It was a dead swan in Pieta-repose. Its belly was split open in a clean long cut, exposing its greying entrails. Not a drop of blood or tufted feathers. Its neck broken and arched in sainted ecstasy. Purple and orange blossoms had been scattered around its head like a halo. There was something beautiful but jarring about this swan. How peaceful it was, how carefully but cruelly it had been discarded. How it did not bear the usual stench of death and attracted no insects. Who would kill a swan? Who didn’t leave a single drop of blood on this gutted creature? Who crowned it with flowers? We slipped through the tree branches and rested in the shade by the water and slept the day away.

Hitchhiking off the island, we encountered buildings with strange geomantic symbols and enneagrams engraved into them, and locusts copulating in the dry heat. We watched the fireworks from a freeway overpass where the cars sounded like water. I felt expansive and powerful and free. Fearless. Filled with love and awe. Ingested psychoactives and lay on the bed together for hours. We spoke and laughed and fucked and I remember feeling like my whole body became a permeable vibration. I had slipped myself open to receive everything he had been or was or felt or thought or saw, to embrace and understand the totality of his existence, to in turn give him everything I had ever been in my life. You do not simply offer yourself to someone. You tear a hole for them to seep in through. A complete state of psychic intercourse between our dripping flesh. I sank into fabricated surreality and slept at sunrise. I had dreams of swans, of locusts, of Apollo, of the black baptism, of solemnity, of the terror of God, and the Yonic void.