Sometimes life is chaos – static on a television screen. There is so much going on, and we can’t make sense of it all. All we hear is the white noise that the sensory overload of life creates. We are constantly being bombarded – our five senses experience so much at the same time that we couldn’t possibly have the space in our minds to interpret all that is being absorbed. Sight. Touch. Scent. Sound. Taste. To top it all off, our emotions have a way of coloring our world and our senses with all that it touches. The result? A muddled mess of color and craze – the blur and the fury that we call our life experience.

I had the opportunity a few weekends ago to sort through this sensory disarray, albeit through unnatural means. Three tiny magic mushrooms in a little plastic bag were the catalyst of such a trip that left me feeling focused – completely fixated on that one thing for which the world has an insatiable appetite – love. And with that fixation on love, naturally, came a fixation on beauty. The beauty of the world I lived in, the beauty of the girl that I loved, and the beauty of the purest of my emotions. Removed from my experience was the chaos and the confusion that comes from everyday life. I felt no doubt – I felt sure. And there was nothing in the world that I was more sure of than the fact that I loved her.

The world around me was a dream, and I was on an island. The island was our love, and no one else existed. The oceans danced before me, and the earth breathed and hummed with life. The skies were painted with the color of our love, and the sand beneath my feet was saturated with the depth of my feelings. I was a child – in awe of the world and the love that I felt for the only one who mattered. The world around us became only that which I cared about, and all that mattered was that she was next to me, and that I could feel her arms around me. Simplicity filled the world with incomparable beauty. She smiled, and I felt my heart fill with joy and pride. Her arms wrapped around me, and I felt the island close around us. I felt the wind blowing in our hair, removing everyone else from the scene. I could hear only one song, and that song became the soundtrack to our love story.

Me. Her (and that meant so much more than that one word can ever express.) My arms around her tight. The sand around us. The wind in our hair.  The waves crashing against the pier. Hours pass. I don’t know where I am. I don’t care where I am. The beauty of that feeling was immeasurable. Our island became the vessel on which I found my escape from the unstoppable train of life.

I felt like a child, and wrapped up in her arms, I was safe and oblivious to the world around us. We were innocent and in love, and the world could not touch us. So much beauty can be found in the rejection of everything but a feeling. And when that feeling becomes the entire world – when we tune into one channel and clear away the static of everyday life, life takes on the feeling of art. That day was the canvas on which all we painted was love. Looking back, I see so much beauty that I can hardly stand it. Sorting through the messy scatterings of my memories, I know one thing is true – that feeling is the most reality I’ve ever felt.