...

You don’t remember how you came to be in the park, sitting Indian style under a tree, drawing long drags from a cigarette yielding a strangely metallic taste. Looking up through the canopy of the large tree above your vision flattens out, all effective depth perception gone as the world appears as if projected onto a screen of water twenty feet in front of you. You blow impossibly voluminous clouds of smoke upward; they are captured and made to radiate outward by the flat ceiling that is the world overhead. Your vision is atomizing everything you see into pixels, like looking closely at an old black and white newspaper photo. You are unnerved. Time is gone.
A small voice calling out to you from somewhere deep in the cavernous recesses of your mind warns you to turn back; but from where? Your chest heaves slightly as you soundlessly laugh at the voice within.
The trees across the field from you expand and contract like giant lungs; you notice they are moving in unison with your breathing, and the weight of this sudden realization flattens the frenetic jangling in your mind. You feel an emergent panic in your chest, finding the knowledge that the trees are breathing with you, for you and you for them, unbearable; so you close your stubbornly resistant eyelids.
A madly swirling paisley print dances before you now, then becomes a squirming mural of cartoon animation psychedelia, turning over and over; now an Indian tapestry of gilded elephants and dancing girls, spinning in little circles across the screen of your mind’s eye; finally it morphs into an alphabet soup, churning and twirling letters of various sizes and styles until you notice they are falling into line, forming a word which becomes clear against a fading backdrop. You read as each letter takes its place:
UNTETHERED