Parasol the Former
Prologue
1
Back before her transcendence, Parasol would most likely have preferred to be called anything but Parasol or a similar-sounding assembly of vowels of consonants.She knew that her mother was fanciful and bizarre and probably had seen the word and lost herself to romantic vistas of a very special daughter whom the world adored for her quirkiness and wit.
It hadn’t quite turned out that way.
Not to glance past the Parasol doubt, she could nearly see her mother in blissful pregnant joy coming across her name and wetting her panties in a self-induced fantasy of romanticism that her daughter would be as fancy and delicate, but also excessively cherished like the lacy, feather umbrellas the goth chicks in school twirled and twisted in their image fanciful and erudite as they pretended like they were vampires, not pale, round overweight girls too fearing of rejection to throw caution to the wind and flirt like normal girls.
But Parasol wasn’t jealous or anything, no.Nor bitter, not Parasol.
She was quite aware of her regrettable condition and how any real touching would melt her from the inside out as though her undies had begun to melt.
I had a perpetually negative way of looking at things from a young age. Someone once applied the term habitual line-crosser.I had laughed; it had not been a joke.Oh well.
Also at quite an early age, my flighty mother began ’taking her darling parasol to the shrink’; but Parasol was already learning to be embarrassed by her mother who was filled with love but not much else.At home, she only sat there and doodled in her notebook or drew morbid little displays of crude darkness while she was supposed to be listening, speaking, or doing much else.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people, she didn’t like talking to them in any assortment of genders and affects.She was fond of saying that she had never had a day of happiness, one of those magical days where a thousand shafts of golden light refracted all around her in colorful, dream-like wonder.
This may have been a cue for her mother to insist it simply wasn’t true, but not all: she may not have had much beyond beauty and kindness, but she always arrived on time with many specific examples prepared for show and tell.
And despite little Johnny the Future Arsonist in the front row and his continual insistence otherwise, Parasol wasn’t a cold, heartless bitch or anything; she rarely derived anything like pleasure from tearing down a person from their high horse and smashing them into the dust as though she was the queen of the mosh pit and exercising her inalienable right to grind into dust any pretty, fragile thing she found that she had taken offense to.
Sometimes the way such a paragraph flowed out before her like a delightful, dreadful poetic license to take another whose feelings are minimally interesting to her because she couldn’t remember if it were true—that she had never been happy—it seemed like it almost certainly was not the truth, but how was he ever to know?
She knew she had seen nothing of blazing, golden light and nothing opposite of such a thing.Her therapist loved to drone on and on about the consequences inherent in every choice that fell upon us in our lives, but as far as a historian-guided complexity evaded me at each corner of this story, I have considered being more sexually explorative, butsome stuff was not made to be taken frommy purse lol
It felt not only vaguely pretentious when once upon a time my shower and the cramped pockets, how better to attract you than I nor my roommate had asked me to get—he’s a horrible driver and nothing to be done to prevent anything?
In a lot of ways, she feels that she’s been outside and always knows that she will serve the instructional phenom my Staff Sgt saw.Parasol didn’t go with them that night nor work closing as a stranger’s most recent pussy to write home about.There was only one reason: Ketamine.
2
It had been at the very least six weeks earlier that Parasol had begun to begin her research into a way to improve her mood if not for her well-being, then for the people in her life who seemed more or less stuck with her and her dysfunctions and a variety of major malfunctions.
She had heard about near-death experiences and how the drug most often used in causing them, Ketamine, a psychotropic cat tranquilizer also distributrd in powder form as the club drug Special K or simply K.One might be listening to me describe Parasol the Former and shaking their head knowing what lay just over the nearest horizon, but I wouldn’t make anybody guess why she was so sad; or depressed, if that makes you feel besst trnstfomed from her usual monochromatic bleach blonde in a punk-inspired leather-esque, chain-draped ensemble into a much different woman through her own, personal, looking glass, She looked at the endlessl, blocky excerpts managed neatly by amateur-grade php without even worrying or considering that what her favorite research tool, a non-profit website called Erowid that was divided into the deliriously many groups and subgroups of different classed of over-the-counter, prescription, illicit and research-grade drugs that the kind of person who frequented Erowid cared about: what would you get a girl not unlike Parasol off, how much should one take and where could such a thing be found?
Her favorite feature was none of those, fairly universal arrays of information, but what Erowid called ’trip reports.’ In very clinical, pseudo-scientific language, users described what was taken and in what preparation, and a blow-by-blow in often visceral, reality-bending prose describing the entire length of the experience.Sometimes, the user would give a secondary evaluation from a clearer head, but not always.
Where could she have learned such dangerous, counter-cultural data as a teenage girl of no remarkable intellect nor advanced social status in the community?
It was a depressing but profound paradox that the internet was a bountiful warehouse of information of great help and worth and, in a dichotomically negative, reverse- image of any free exchange of information without an overbearing and rights-invading system of censorship valued, the internet also housed well-documented data of all of humanity’s worst ideas in graphic, hideous three-dimensional glory that could truly inspire the right mind, or rob the wrong one of its innocence.
For Parasol, it delivered unto her a possible solution without two essential pieces of data that might’ve made this story much less like a slow march to certain doom up to this point.
On one such excursion in brief, an undisturbed world where hackers spend a great deal of their time in explanation of their own story and as a way of studying people from afar, and in a very believable and intriguing combination of technical jargon and psychedelic double-speak, Parasol found more than she ever could have guessed might interest her about near-death experiences via the use of high doses of the disassociative hallucinogen—and feline tranquilizer—Ketamine.
Hanging on every word as though it was her own prescription for an end to the maddening, tedium of infinite shades of dreary, lifeless gray.
“In a successful near-death experience using the disassociative properties of Ketamine and similar compounds, many users describe nearly religious experiences that are almost always, to some degree, life-changing,” one particular user to which Parasol never bothered trying to reach out to—even inexperienced little she knew if you put anything but false information on a website such as Erowid, you were all but asking for the FBI or DEA to SWAT you into a likely chance at a significant, prison sentence in a federal pen with the ultimate keepsake: paperwork that began The United States of America vs. (Enter your foolhardy name here).
“The most successful of these near-death rehabilitations arent for severely, critically depressed persons with long, hopeless psychiatric histories, but rather those who experience symptoms that while irrefutably an interruption in what may be a pleasant life but without any of those necessary bits that make the usual method of psychiatric recovery—any number of therapeutic, psychology-based sessions with a therapist—possible, let alone likely.”
It’s important that I now tarnish this wonderfully assembled bit of sunshine amidst a dark, and hopeless vista those two necessary bits of information such a user might not include in their post, though the reasons why vary from user to user and rarely are assessed as purposefully neglectful for malicious reasons.
Ketamine and the kind of compounds used for these kinds of experiences aren’t like smoking some good California Kush and having innocent, unprotected sex in your parent’s sedan.They are a fickle mistress and even to those well versed in their possible side effects and the proper methods of reversing any extreme or even allergic response, it could prove to be horrific in the best of cases, and fatal in many others.
More importantly, now that the typical near-disinformation regarding anything that provides a profound, psychedelic experience, it’s rarely mentioned that near-death experiences are not something you learn all about on Erowid and then accomplish on yourself.They are a procedure administered to you, preferably by a credible health practitioner or a fairly intelligent person who was not partaking in the festivities for that night at the very least.These procedures are rarely legal in most settings, so a medical professional, unless afflicted with a grievous rebellion against any number of things, society included, will not condone nor attempt them.
With that final bit regurgitated into your lap, oozing with over-protective adult fun-hating innuendo, I will give Parasol credit where it is due.It was roughly two weeks into a six-week-long thought process when she first read one of these legitimate-sounding reports on near-death experiences as a rehabilitative tool.But she kept reading and thinking, and although one can never truly be sure, Parasol kept trying.
