I took the bus to the rainforest today. I waited at the bus stop with some strange people. The bus went around campus for a while and on the highway and I saw all the buildings and cars. Then the bus turned into an enormous bird and all of us, the passengers, were holding onto its wings. It swooped into the mist and we were riding in a dense fog surrounded by palm trees.
The sidewalk was flat and white and very wide. The sky was grey and you could tell it was connected with the clouds above the sea. I walked on the side of the street and stopped in some stores. There were beautiful birds singing everywhere and the people were making music too. The air was filled with music and the songs were very misty. The songs were very strange and high pitched. It was almost as though you could not hear them at all, that they were hallucinatory in nature, or a melody from a time long past still ringing in your ears. The birds appeared like shooting stars streaking through the trees against the clouds.
I stopped inside a shop and a woman spoke to me, what I assumed to be a greeting in a language I did not recognize. She spoke in clicks and wails, words that were at once rhythmic and smooth. Her hair was curly and black, frizzy from the humidity, and the fabric of her shirt was bunched up like the folds and ripples of the evening sky. An assorment of curious objects littered the display tables. A crystal ball caught my eye and I stared into the glass waiting for something to emerge.
I don't know how long I was staring but I suddenly found myself, as though I had just woken up from a very long dream, on an orange sand path winding about as long as I could see through an infinite field of crystals. I was surrounded by trapezohedral stones with translucent faces that refracted a million rays of light and emitted the strange illusion that there was something staring back at me, as the green stones appeared to form the giant multifaceted eye of a mystical creature, maybe God himself. I don't know where the brilliant light was coming from because the sky was a void. I thought perhaps it was coming from within the crystals themselves.