There’s a bitter taste in my mouth and a pounding headache, resonating with the music that hangs heavy in the air, threatening to crack my skull. My heart feels like a lead balloon, heavy, exerting a dull pressure on my ribs, and still expanding, like I’m only minutes away from bursting apart at the seams. There’s a thousand fleeting thoughts scattered through my mind, illusions that come and go like sand slipping through my fingers each time I make a grasp, and it’s bliss that keeps these fragments of sanity at bay. I won’t waste my time with glue and a concentration I don’t have to piece the fragments together, and all it takes is careless, fluid movement to the blurry beat, hair spilling over my shoulders and feet aching, for the fragments to fall apart, to the floor.

There’s a time and a place for careful thought, for hours spent reflecting and cataloging and categorizing until the world sits neatly divided into a million equal parts, but now, when I’m not sure if the ground beneath my feet is even quite real, is not it. Not with this euphoria on my breath, mingling with each exhale, sugar and the bitter burn of alcohol. I let the world, my vision, my thoughts blur, a conscious invitation for instinct to work its way into my bones, take over where for so long deliberation had failed me, until the world is rushing past.

My invincibility is an illusion just as much as these fleeting glimpses of insight in the blur of experience, but God, I feel as if nothing in the world can touch me. I am surrounded, on all sides, people pressing in and pulling away in this haze, and even with their skin pressed against my own, I feel entirely singular. The blur is too much, faces weaving together, pulling apart, so I shut my eyes, fireworks for the New Year dripping from behind my eyelids down my fingertips, light conducted across my skin, electricity on my tongue and tracing its way across my spine, bending and breaking and crackling like I’m a live wire.

Letting go like this is too easy, I know, but right now the threads of myself are being pulled apart in all directions. I’m unraveling, and it feels like exaltation, and I wouldn’t stop it for the world, like a freight train cutting a path through my brain, it has to run its course. All I can do is let it happen, mindless freedom like the blood in my veins, rushing.