Kaimi's Excursion

Well that got dark fast, sorry guys, I don't really mean that I don't like people. I like the public as individuals, but as a whole they are a turd show. A necessary turd show, but a turd show nonetheless. I like people. I just don't like spending my time taking care of them, but for the last five years or so this is how I have made my living. I go into my wonderful bar-tending job to kiss people's asses so that I have luxuries like food, water, and electricity.

I left early today, apparently telling your boss to get his head out of his own ass, gets you an early day. I had to get out of there. I needed some time away so that I could breathe anyway. I decided to go downtown and browse the little strip. The place is a great hodgepodge of hipster collectives. I mean there is a whole shop that is nothing but mustache products, it is delightfully quirky. I have missed spending time downtown. It looks like my favorite little coffee shop has been replaced by a new age tea shoppe. I didn't want tea. I wanted the slight caffeine buzz you get from coffee, but I guess tea will have to work.

I step into the tea shoppe and a small woman pokes her head around a corner in the back, yelling at me to hang on a second she will be right out. So now I am going to have to settle for tea and the woman is taking a while to get to me. I am over today. I should have just gone home when the manager told me to, but no I wanted to be around people. I wanted to get lost in a crowd, unfortunately everyone else did not, they were all apparently anywhere but downtown. I have decided I will give the small woman one minute, and then if she hasn't come out, I am heading home to the quiet of my apartment, to overthink everything.

Luckily at like forty seven seconds, the small woman comes around from the back and says. "Well hello. I am Mandy. I own this shoppe. I don't think I have seen you here before, what brings you in today?"

"Well," And for some reason I just break loose and tell this woman I have never seen before, almost, all of my inner thoughts. "I am freaking out a little, because I hate my job, but make too much money to leave the job that I hate. I don't like my apartment but I can't afford a new one without a roommate and don't want a roommate. I constantly feel restless and unsettled. I just want to move toward something, but I have no idea what that something could be. But," I say suddenly embarrassed. "You probably meant what kind of tea I came in for?"

"No honey you told me exactly what I was asking." The small woman had lavender eyes that were just shining up at me.

"Those are some great contacts." I say.

"What?" She giggled a little and then said. "Oh they aren't contacts, the color runs in my family."

I look away from her slender frame to look up at the menu board, for the first time realizing how odd the little shoppe appears to be. There are tea options that say, when you feel overwhelmed because the baby won't sleep through the night and your spouse never hears the cries, and when you can't think of how to tell the girl next door you think you are in love with her. What a cute quirky way to name drinks, I may end up really enjoying this shoppe.

"I know the tea choices are a little overwhelming, aren't they?" The narrow face of the shoppe owner pins me, like she is staring into my soul, and won't look away. "I think you need some of the I hate my job blues and figuring out what the hell to do with the rest of my life."

"Sure sounds great." I say laughing, and pat my flat-ish stomach. "Can we make it half fat? I am trying to watch my figure."

"It isn't a laughing matter." Mandy suddenly sobers and is staring at me with those penetrating eyes again.

" I didn't mean to offend you." I say somberly.

"Oh," Mandy says, looking at me. "No, I am made of tougher stuff than that. You didn't offend me. You just sit down there in the back. You aren't going to enjoy your tea here at the bar, the seats aren't comfortable for the long term. I'll bring it to the table for you."

"Thank you." I move off of the stool and find a small little wing back chair that is in a deep eggplant color, it feels like heaven when I sit down. My body just sinks into the soft velvet of the chair and I instantly know that Mandy's shoppe is going to be one of my new favorite spots. I could sit in this chair forever. Mandy walks over, setting my tea on the little nightstand looking table next to me. "I may never leave, this chair is amazing. Where did you get it?"

"Oh an old friend made that chair. He said it would help people to get the most out of my tea journeys. He brings me new pieces now and again when he feels like it is time for someone to take a journey. I received this chair just a few days ago, I believe he brought it for you." Mandy said.

"That is awesome because I love this chair. Can I buy it and take it home with me?" I ask.

"No they have to stay with me." Mandy says. "But maybe if you play your cards right you will end up with it at your apartment?"

"That is too bad." I say looking at the strange little woman, her eyes were now a soft green. "How did you do that?"

"What?" Mandy looks at me. I shake my head to indicate that I have changed my mind. I was going to act any weirder than I already had been , by asking her what was up with her eyes. I mean people's eyes don't change colors. "Well you just sit back and enjoy your tea now. I'll be back to check on you later."

I sit back, grab my phone out, get on my reading app, and begin to read while sipping my wonderful blend of not quite fruity tea. The taste is very strange, and I can't even in my own mind describe what it tastes like exactly. At some point I must have dozed off because after a few moments I found myself not inside the small little tea shoppe, but a beautiful meadow with flowers that could not be real. The flowers were an unnatural color, a color somewhere between orange and yellow, oddly enough it mattered how you looked at the flower in the sun on which color you saw.

The sky was a vivid blue, the grass was an unnaturally shiny green. My mind had made a place that could not be mistaken for real. It was like walking into the Willy Wonka factory in high def. So I decided if my mind was going to make me a Willy Wonka place to go in my dreams, I was going to taste test the flowers. They look delicious. "Yuck." I spat it out then tried to wipe it off my tongue with my hand, it tasted metallic. "This obviously isn't candy."

How was I tasting a dream? What had been in that tea? Then I heard a small voice that seemed to be right next to my ear. "What on Earth are you doing?" I look over in the direction of the noise, seeing a small lime green bug, and it has landed on my shoulder. "I don't even eat the flowers in this field, and I eat everything. They cause serious nausea. So again I ask, what on Earth are you doing?"

"That is a great question." I suddenly became very self-conscious about talking to a bug, even though this was a dream, and I mean who cared what I did inside my own head. "I have no idea. I left work early, and am sitting in some strange little tea shoppe downtown by my house, apparently falling asleep in a chair in the back corner. Your guess is as good as mine since you are a figment of my imagination, right?"

That apparently offended my imaginary talking bug friend, because he flew off my shoulder. "Hey." I yell at the bug, as he flies away. "I wasn't done talking to you."

"Well I was done talking to you." The little bug says. "I don't spend time with crazy people anymore."

"Well that was rude, and what do you mean by anymore?" Now I had a sense of abandonment by a bug, who stopped talking to me in a field of impossible daisies, and maybe I was crazy. No I was crazy. I was talking to bugs and eating fake flowers.

"Who are you talking to?" I heard a masculine voice come up from behind me.

"Look if you are a goat or something just go ahead and warn me before I turn around, because this dream is starting to feel like a bad trip." I smacked my forehead then. "That bitch, she dosed me."

"I am a full grown man. Are you lost? What is wrong with you?" The deep voice asks.

"Why does everyone in my dream keep asking me wha. . ." Then my thought process went blank. Oh my. Now this was more what dreams were made of. "Why hello. You look like you would taste yummy." I air on the side of bold, why hold back in a dream?

"Excuse me?" The muscled man, who could easily double as a pirate on one of those romance novel covers, said in a deep voice that inspired my insides to quiver. "Do you need help finding the woman who you call Bitch? Is she your companion?"

"No I have no companion." I say looking at him like he is a delectable piece of chocolate, possibly the last of the good chocolate, the one you save for days before you break down and eat it. "I am alone. Single. Available." Even in my dreams I sound desperate.

"Not what I meant." He said deadpan. "My name is Nolan. I would be glad to help you find your friend so that you may go home."

"Okay." I say looking at the dirty, but delicious, man again. "If this dream is to be a quest, let's go.