The Idiot God by Nick Sayers I used to be the type of person who nonchalantly said, "The only time I feel lonely is when I'm with other people." I’d refuse any entreaty to dent my thick shell with curiosity and be on my way. I can’t say I'm the same after the colorless cloud Ryan and I found in the woods.Hometowns feel like a tomb to the college-bound, but I always regretted leaving. It was never a tomb to me. Not until it was. Back home, Ryan and I would spend an evening drinking cheap beer, talking about high school girls and the cosmic indifference of a post-religious world. Sometimes, the best times were spent in a shitty easy chair, staring at the stars in complete silence. The infinite things we'd never say to each other passed between us with gentle repose. It was usually when one of us would grunt and say something stupid or get up to take a leak—a balance of the sacred and the mundane in every moment.It was during one of these perfect, quiet evenings that the realization hit me: I'd have to go back to school in three days. The thought gave me a gnawing sense of nausea about my life and my little-to-no place in driving it. I tried looking at Ryan to distract myself, only to develop a feeling of a familiar mix of jealousy and pride over his simplicity. The feeling was quickly siphoned from consciousness as a sound vibrated from the dark woods behind Ryan’s house.“Did you see that?” Ryan asked.“No, but I heard it. What was it?”“The flash.”I sure as shit would've seen a flash. I looked at Ryan and saw deep fear in his eyes, mingling with the reflection of his cheap LED porch light. I let my “what flash?” become another one of those infinite, unsaid things. My skin turned cold, and I could hear myself panting slightly. I tried to mask it with deep, quiet breaths, but it only made my hunger for oxygen more dire. It meant nothing because Ryan’s eyes were streaming with tears.“Ryan. What’s going on, man?”He looked at me as if I had just walked into his trailer after being away for a semester—a hanging “what the fuck are you doing here” in his gaze. “Ryan?”“What?”I stared at him, then looked toward the treeline. He stood up and started to walk toward the darkness.“Dude. No.”He ignored me. It was like those situations where someone stands in an elevator normally and everyone else enters and faces the other way, until the one person not in on the joke turns around to face the wrong way, too. Here was my dipshit self, standing off my chair and following him.“Where are we going?”“Did you see it?”“No, dude. What? I hear a weird sound.”“You didn’t see the flash? The air and colors?”“No,” was all I could get out as we started to jog into the darkness.Hindsight screams, don’t fucking go into the dark forest after the non-Euclidean, flashy cloud your drunk friend just saw. But that’s not how these things work. Not with Ryan and me. From poking a dead raccoon for hours, to playing chicken with an Amtrak train, to discussing the complete isolation of being an individual in a connected universe, we always chased the bunny deeper. We never asked why or by what means we'd exhaust our curiosity—a boyish hubris about knowledge always present.I would have scratched my scalp if I had remembered how to work my hand as I saw what was in the clearing under the weight of the starlight. A cloud? A portal? A simple trick of light? What fucking light? Ryan looked at me for the first time since he knew me and simply stated, “Now you see.” A simplistic understatement that shook my grip on my, well, everything.Then Ryan touched the damn thing. If "touch" were a sufficient sensory experience to describe it. His fingers elongated through the cloud like they were in a fishbowl, reaching for heaven. When he finally collapsed on the ground and woke up three hours later, I had him...

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