Experiences May Differ

Just one look. Wouldn't hurt, would it? That's what they all say. That's what they never stop saying. Don't look through the keyhole. Don't tempt fate, don't push for the unseen to be seen. Don't strike up a parley with the unknown beyond the liminality of your doorway/doorframe. Still, what would the harm be in looking through the keyhole or the peephole? The peephole was designed by Abe Nichols and Joseph Spector, who patented their specific version of a concept that had existed for many centuries, and it became known as the optical door peephole or wide-angle door viewer.

Holes fill the atmosphere with a sense of mystery and offer a glimpse of something. Perhaps something racy and scandalous, like a woman baring all to a man half her age who was not her lawfully wedded husband. Maybe still it would reveal a close-up and damning record of the local drug issues, as a tirelessly enterprising peddler of oxy, speed, meth, or common garden weed (allotment-grown by retired Dave and ready to fill the spliffs of the sativa-loving generation we've become).

But the warning was, don't look through the keyhole. It became like one of those warnings from the great and dusty books of old - don't consider the green of the garden on the other side of the fence, for you will feel regret over the green of the garden on your side of the fence.

But as I, Joshua, your faithful and intrepid adventurer into the world of liminality and possibility, stood at the precipice between oblivion and the truth, I felt determined in my focus. Determined to see this through. To look through the keyhole.

The hour was approaching. How did I know? I had meticulously researched the special hour, when nothing and everything made sense, and in fact wouldn't stop making sense.

I had read blow-by-blowback accounts of the stoners and the amyl sniffers who had bravely faced down the same gauntlet that faced me.

'Personal experiences may differ greatly,' was the TL;DR of one fellow's account. Who likely sought to feel a little escapism from the weighted blanket of burdening anxiety that followed a simple glance through a simple optical viewing device.

While personal experiences may differ, some key aspects were always the same: the drop in temperature—wait, is it colder now? My thoughts stuttered, narration glitching for a moment. There was a strange smell of... what is that smell? Ah, that's right, candyfloss and sulphur.

I prepared myself for the moment. Took a breath. Prayed to the great Ayatollah or some such decrepit humo-deity [Editor's note - stop making words up like a pseudo-Shakespeare, Josh]. Then blinked. That blink you do before you are going to try and win a staring competition. I didn't want my ocular nerves to miss a thing.

As I pressed my skin to the plated gold of the keyhole and felt the invisible signs of corrosion scratch at the delicate skin beneath my eyes, the coldness hit me. Not just on my skin, but against my eyeball. There was total darkness. Which sounds like a flex. Have you ever seen total darkness? No? Neither had I, until my eye was pressed in this precarious position. It was at that point that I remembered the rest of my body did not like to be placed into a hunch for prolonged durations of time, but this was it. I was there for the long haul.

Personal experiences may differ in terms of the length of time it took for A) anything to happen and b) for whatever happened to continue. I had heard whispered, rumoured promises of an hour-long peepshow of entertainment. But that guy took more meth (and by meth I mean methylated spirits) than anyone else I'd ever known.

One thing was for sure, I would only get one chance. The keyhole grants each user only one chance, one vision or experience. Often, people would wait all their lives and only choose to look as their dying breaths left their bodies.

That felt like a wasted opportunity, like those who put off getting inked up because they worry too much about "choosing the right design". So their skin remains dull, plain, and uninspiring because they didn't want to take the leap. The leap of faith that comes from letting another person inject ink beneath the surface of your skin with what is considered to be a painfully euphoric experience. You sit there focusing on their lip or nose ring, or that tattoo of a green and blue iguana they have just below their left ear.

All that aside, it felt like the darkness was mocking me. Like the darkness was sharing a private joke with the cold about the downfall of man, or maybe a terrible knock-knock punchline. My eye watered, though not so much from the strain of holding it open. It was irritated by a sweetness in the air, sweetness cut with sulphur and just a hint of lemongrass. The darkness gave way to light, which wasn't exactly surprising. It was what followed that ticked all the boxes of my mental "What the fuck?" list of potential outcomes.

The bright white canvas within the keyhole felt... alive? The question mark here denotes how ridiculous and also not ridiculous that sounds. Writers and creatives well know the power of liminality and of seemingly static spaces or colour schemes.

This was breathing with a wheezy-woozy kind of cadence to its inhalations and exhalations. Then. Nothing. Again.

I was undeterred, though. If this was truly what my experience was going to be, I was going to sit there and take it all in. Then I could complain riotously to anyone that would listen about how unimpressed I was with the whole thing.

Similar to the way I reacted when I tried a "magic eye" picture when I was a kid, and was dismayed that the Jackson Pollack on the canvas became the same Jackson Pollack when I gave myself double vision trying to bring to life the magic.

Don't get me wrong, Lavender Mist is one of the most breathtaking and woefully misunderstood pieces of art I have ever experienced. But it was not the magic I was expecting.

Experiences may differ, indeed.

Never expect anything, and you'll never be disappointed. I'm sure there are demotivational posters with those words.

Alas, my dogged determination (read here as stubborn petulance) paid off, as I was presented with an eyeball eyeballing my eyeball. The irony wasn't lost on me. At first, my thought was "nice mirror trick, asswipe," but when the eyeball eyeballing my eyeball stopped following the direction of the pupil in mine, I knew something different was happening.

The eye was also the wrong colour. Sparkling green with a hint of abysmal grey. The pupil was clearly dilated, and someone, the owner of said eye, or the procurer of said eye, was having either A) a terribly good time, thank you very much, or b) was being tortured within an inch of his life. I hasten to say I am not too sure which is the better outcome. [Editor's Notes: Probably better than reading this blow-by-blow account.]

Don't ask me why, but it was definitely the peeper of a bloke.

The silence was stifling, like the silence that follows when you first sit in a public toilet cubicle and are trying desperately not to let everyone else know how desperate you are to clear your bowels with that shit you let hang in your system until you couldn't bear it.

From just the fluctuations of his eyeball, it looked and sounded (there were muffled grunts) like he was trying to push through the keyhole itself. His body was jerking in a rhythm I didn't really want to understand. [Editor's Notes: Is this totally necessary?]

That scintillating smell of sulphur mixed with the candyfloss.

Then I felt my own body shift, mirroring the imagined movements of the peeper on the other side of the corroded plated gold keyhole. A dance of desire, was this?

A full commitment and surrender to untapped... something. [Editor's Notes: Something. Is this based on a true story?]

I felt my eye water more, glistening as the other glistened too. We were locked in our door-embrace [Editor's Notes: What the hell is a door-embrace?...]

The air between our eyes tasted sweet — too sweet — like candyfloss steeped in syrup. I wanted to pull back, to breathe clean air again, but something held me there. This was my moment, after all. My one moment.

The door pulsed beneath my skin, spongy and alive.

I guess. It's a strange thing having to describe things that you've never experienced before. That's why I'm the writer and you're the reader.

[Author’s note: Is this what heaven or hell feels like? The keyhole, the door, the sulphur, the candyfloss.]

The door pushed against—or was it under?—my hands, as we both merged with it. The he and the me. Our breathing in unison, or maybe it was just the blood in my head again. Maybe it was the gas, or the fact I'd been standing here too damn long, breathing the rot of my own poor brain. But the sweetness in the air still tasted like someone else's breath on mine.

Experiences may differ, but another similarity is that all experiences come to an end.

A crushing [lonely] end, where we're left to face the self-loathing alone. Curiosity, a modern contagion — looking because we can’t bear to face reality without the fantasy.