hwango

I opened my eyes and was overwhelmed by a sense of confusion and disorientation. Where was I? What was happening? After a few moments, however, these feelings passed, and I realized what must have happened. Apparently, I had gone insane.

My surroundings offered pretty much everything the newly crazy could ask for. It had violently purple trees that grew sideways out of hills that corkscrewed into the air in impossibly twisty shapes. Unripened bananas ran back and forth across the branches on tiny little legs and made angry squeaking noises at each other. A small puddle of water drifted past my head, its surface suddenly broken as a starfish riding a penny farthing bicycle emerged and rode off into the sky. A shimmering silver cloud swam out from behind what I had assumed was the horizon and provided a moment of shade from the rapidly spinning square sun. The whirling paused for a moment so that the sun could lash out with a tongue like a frog’s to snatch the cloud and swallow it whole. You get the idea. If one of the creatures that Alice met in Wonderland fell down a rabbit hole, it would have been lucky to end up in a place only half as ludicrous.

I stood up and immediately wished that I hadn’t. Dizziness, nausea, and a stabbing headache all ganged up on me and nearly knocked me right back over again. I had a vague thought that perhaps I shouldn’t anthropomorphize concepts that way, since it seemed the sort of thing the world around me might do, and I didn’t want to give it any ideas. Imagine how unpleasant it would be to have a conversation with Nausea, after all.

The world didn’t look any more sensible or welcoming now that I was vertical, but it didn’t seem likely that I’d find a way out of the place just by curling up in a ball on the ground and weeping uncontrollably, no matter how appealing an idea it seemed right then. Not far away I spotted a miniature yellow elephant that appeared to knitting a canoe. Knitting would appear to indicate some sort of higher brain functions, and the determination required to undertake a task so monumentally ill-suited to the shape of its forelimbs impressed me greatly. I tottered over to it and performed a little bow.

“Good…um…” I peered at the madly spinning sun for a moment, “afternoon,” I decided. “I appear to have suffered some sort of massive head trauma and descended into a nightmare world conjured by my deeply disturbed subconscious. Do you suppose that you could direct me towards step one of my metaphorical journey back to sanity?”

The elephant paused in its knitting for a moment and squinted up at me, a fathomless disapproval evident in its dark, beady eyes. “Why do you assume that this is all about you?” it said in a voice entirely too deep for something only eight inches tall and so unbearably adorable. “Can’t a world exist for some reason other than simply to have you in it?”

“Why, certainly,” I replied. “Only, that particular explanation is the one most comforting to me at the moment, as it would mean that I’m not really here and none of this is actually happening. But now that you put it in those terms I can see that it would be greatly upsetting for someone else to claim that you only exist because of something catastrophic that happened to them. Furthermore, that person seems to care only about correcting their own situation so that you can cease to exist. I apologize for my unconscionable rudeness.”

I was exceedingly proud of this speech. I was even more proud of myself for managing to say it with such sincerity and humility, when all I really wanted to do was furiously shake the little elephant and scream about how much I wanted my sanity back. But that hardly seemed like it was going to get me anywhere.

The elephant was either touched by my words or desperately wanted me to go away so that it could resume work on the canoe. Regardless, it pointed with its trunk and said “That way lies what it is that you seek. Walk for seven days and seven nights until you come to a vast and perilous mountain. There, you must –“

“Hang on a moment,” I interrupted. “Is there not, perhaps, a shortcut? Only I fear that if I spend an entire week being insane I might go mad.”

The elephant considered this. “You could,” it said hesitantly, “take the Road Less Traveled. It leads directly to the Last Place You’d Think to Look. Quite possibly you will find what you seek there.”

“That sounds marvelous!” I said. “Which way is that?”

The elephant indicated a direction directly opposite from that which it had indicated previously. I thanked it profusely and set off on my way.

I was filled with the sort of optimism felt only by the very insane and the very desperate. Everything was going to be alright, and I probably wouldn’t have to climb a perilous mountain in order to make it so.

Well, the Road Less Traveled turned out to have a well-deserved name and was less traveled for readily apparent reasons. Significant portions of it narrowed alarmingly as it passed over pools of molten rock, cavernous pits, or – and this was most worrying of all – a pile of what looked like quite soft and comfortable pillows that were surrounded by heaps of well-gnawed bones. As I cautiously crawled along the path over them I happened to look down and see one of the pillows yawn and reveal its numerous sharp teeth. It was at that point in my journey that I exchanged my boundless optimism for an equal measure of paranoid suspicion.

I was attacked by all manner of unlikely assailants and faced countless absurd challenges. I entered into a staring contest with a large wedge of cheese, which I only won by cheating. I found myself challenged to a fiddle duel by a carnivorous tumble weed, which I won mostly because I actually had a fiddle. I played games of chess against toadstools, dominoes with a colony of highly-educated termites, and a savage and disorienting match of hopscotch against a set of giant animated chess pieces that kept munching on toadstools the whole time.

All in all it was a terrifying and deeply harrowing experience, and I can’t even begin to tell you how relieved I am that it’s over. Upon reaching the Last Place You’d Think to Look I was greatly pleased to find a magnificent oak door with a sign above it that said “This Way Back to Sanity.”

“At last!” I thought, and also said aloud, because talking to myself seemed inconsequential when viewed against the backdrop of the madness that surrounded me. I immediately ran to the door, grabbed hold of the knob, flung the door open, and leapt through the opening!

And that, since you ask, is how I came to be in your living room and why I’m quite certain that, no, I am not crazy.