Montezuma’s Psychedelic Revenge

For those of you that are fervent Friday-Night-Facebook-Stalkers, your creeper archives can surely attest to the fact that this past Vendredi was a shit day for me. After having announced to the entire town of Capesterre (police people and grocery store clerks included) that my father would be arriving on the 10:30pm flight from Puerto Rico, he did not.

 

In a surefire and successful attempt to mock me, Her Holiness the Deity of Foul Fridays decided—in addition to leaving me without an excuse to bake and consume copious amounts of welcome Chocolate-Chunk-Banana-Muffins— that I should spend the whole night on the toilet, with explosive diarrhea, truly wishing someone would just kill me once and for all.

 

For the first couple of hours of my malady I played the strong card; I folded laundry and engaged in intellectual conversations about German cinema with my roommate in-between trips to the loo. By eight o’clock though, neither Estela nor I were convinced by my declarations that I was  “ooooooohhhh-kay,” that it was “juuust a little tummy ache” and that it was “ alllllll good.”

 

Our skepticism of my declarations could have easily been based on the fact that I couldn’t stand up without subsequently folding in half, clutching my stomach as if I were clutching my purse in downtown Rio de Janeiro; cognizant, too, that my relatively tanned face was now approximating the colour of an SPF 75 sunscreen, Estela and I hypothesized that things were perhaps not so peachy in the intestinal department after all.

 

It was in this moment in time—in my debut as a phantom contortionist— that Montezuma’s Revenge began to take on psychedelic dimensions. After about my twentieth session in the W/C, I flopped onto my bed, exhausted, took a giant gulp of the 2-litre orange pop that I used as an excuse to “rehydrate” myself, and began dreaming.

 

I dreamed—not that the world had decided to put an end to war—but that I was swimming in an ocean of orange pop. A giant ocean, a sweet ocean, with placid swells and tranquil waves—an ocean where 

I splashed and chatted with my dear friends Estela and Raquel, and occasionally gulped some carbonated yellow number 5

 for the sake of it. I closed my eyes and floated on my back, allowing my body to be rocked back and forth by the gentle pull of the tide, not lucid enough to realize that I would most likely be getting devoured by an army of mosquitoes if I were to truly to basking in a sea of sugar. All of a sudden, I felt a kind of intrinsic sense of urgency, and opened my eyes; there was Raquel waving at me like a madwoman, warning me of something. “OH SHIT!” I screamed “YOU’RE RIGHT! I HAVE TO GO TO THE BATHROOM NOWWWWWWWWW!” And I got out of bed and went about my (excruciating) business.

 

As I sat there on my favourite, donut-shaped chair, I realized how lucky I was to have such good friends in Guadeloupe. Friends who—even in dreams—remind me when it’s time to wake up and get my shit together.