Moonlight Serenity

The brain is capable of the most unfeasible feats. Once the psychedelic mood descended upon Janine, she began to wonder, philosophize about the concept of being alive. “Am I truly alive?”, Janine pondered, as the mushrooms unleashed their full hallucinatory powers, taking her imagination to a hitherto unknown realm. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced before.

“Am I Alice? It feels like I am in Wonderland”. Her widening eyes gazed at the shining moon, this night appearing somehow brighter than the sunrise

did earlier. The purpose of life had so far eluded her trivial existence as a roadside hooker, who had suffered her fair share of tragedy — she had seen every kind of man there is. There was Joey, the frustrated priest who had committed to a lifetime of celibacy way too early, only to regret it later in life — “Joey” — she teared up as she whispered his name — “You were always so kind to me. I think we both realized just how lonely we truly are. Your presence always comforted me; I think my presence comforted you, too.”

There was Manolo, the Puerto Rican diplomat who sought her out to fulfill his darkest fantasies. Janine did not know his full name, yet she regularly tried to imagine the intricate difficulties of leading a double life. “A diplomat in real life. Well, not so diplomatic in bed”, she chuckled, as she reminisced their frequently savage experien ces in the cheap and dirty motel room far removed from the world of fancy cocktail parties Manolo so wished to escape from.

Despite their glaring disparities, all her customers reminded Janine in one way or the other of her late son, whose biological fath er she had never managed to find. A tiny detail, a tiny flaw — everything she had left from him were the memories of a nice young man who wanted to change the world. Memories that now plagued her every time she spotted some semblance of her deceased offspring in any man she met. In a certain fashion, every customer just wanted what every little boy wants: to be listened to, to cuddle, to lie in bed with a beautiful stranger who makes them oblivious to the world spinning around them.

For all the epiphanic serenity of the moment, there was a hint of poetic sadness in the way Janine silently lied on the hilltops of the Australian landscape, the same hilltops her mother used to…