Before I begin I would just like to say that I am dedicating this book to my wife Angie. Thank you so much for nagging me for 15 years to finally sit down and write something. I never would have if you hadn't seen what no one else could. I never really cared if anyone saw me but I am glad someone did. This book embodies everything that I see when I look at you babe.
I would also like to give a special tip of the hat to one M. James Keenan who's extensive catalog of amazing art over the years served as the AFFLATUS for the naming of each chapter, all but one.
This is the zodiac, I serve as the murder of modern literature. Sorry no, I just always wanted to write that out. This is ABRAXAS. The god Abraxas is responsible for blending the dark and the light. The hard and the soft. The Noam Chomsky's and the Kim Kardashian's. The blend is not always even or fare, but in this fakality, we work with the clay we have available. I may not be the greatest writer but I think you will be hard pressed to find another that has such a wide and eclectic catalog as I. This particular book is my, dare I say, softer side. Do not get comfortable with it, this will not become a habit I assure you. I felt like I nearly lost my mind when channeling the continence found within. I have several more stories I would like to get out before my psychotropic break and end up in a home somewhere eating paste and collecting my own pee. I hope at least one person gets out of this what I put into it. Even if that never happens, I wanted to write something like this to see how far I could push myself out of my comfort zone. Now that all the hot air has been purged from it's bag, here it is, open for your pleasure and condemnation.
LYRAC SYNESTETICA
CHAPTER 1 - TEDIUM
Lyra Moore had always hated the sound of her own life when it was quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that meant peace, or rest. The kind that meant empty noise. When there is nothing to focus on and your head runs at terminal velocity until you want to cry.
Michigan winters were built on that kind of quiet. The kind that made people say, It's peaceful here, when what they meant was, Nothing happens here. The kind of quiet that pressed against the eyes from deep inside your mind.
Lyra's house sat on the edge of a small town that had once made... things. It had made car part things, made furniture things, made a kind of steady work ethic that lasted through generations. Now the factories were closed. The docks were empty. The town's old pride had been repurposed into something else—something quieter. Something, thingless.
Survival.
Lyra had always been thought of as a pretty girl. She was half Irish and half something else. Italian maybe, maybe with a dusting of middle eastern in there somewhere. She was never able to get much out of her mother when it came to dad. Her eyes were wide, Irish wide and her cheekbones were low. She looked a little like Lucy MacLean from the Fallout series. Only without the nose-job.
She lived alone in a modest house that was too large for one person and too small for her to feel like she was ever going to escape it. The walls were the color of old paper. The floorboards creaked in the way that made you aware of your own weight, as if you were constantly reminding you there was always something to fix next.
Lyra worked from home, writing reports for a company in Detroit that sold software no one understood and nobody wanted. Her days were the same: wake, coffee, laptop, meetings where everyone sounded like they were speaking at her, not to her, and then—by late afternoon—an empty house and the sense that time was bleeding out through the seams.
She didn't mind the work. She didn't even mind the loneliness. She had learned to live inside herself. This way of life was empty and yet too crowded inside herself.
That was the thing about silence: it didn't just mean the absence of noise. It meant the absence of distraction.
Lyra didn't like what she heard when she was left alone with her own thoughts.
It was the kind of thing that made people think you were looking for meaning in the wrong places.
She had been looking, though she wouldn't have called it that.
For months now, Lyra had been collecting things. Not objects—ideas. Fragments of something she couldn't name. A podcast about neuroplasticity that made her pause mid-commute. An article on Tibetan monks who could raise their body temperature through meditation alone. A documentary about people who claimed they'd rewired their entire consciousness in ten days.
She saved them all. Bookmarked them. Never mentioned them to anyone.
It wasn't that she believed in mysticism. She just couldn't stop thinking about the idea that the mind was a place you could go—deliberately, intentionally—and come back different.
That there might be a version of herself she hadn't met yet.
The algorithm knew before she did.
It was a Tuesday afternoon when the ad appeared between two work emails. A retreat in the Amazon basin. Seven days. A ceremony led by indigenous practitioners who had been doing this for longer than Michigan had been a state. The language was careful—plant medicine, sacred tradition, consciousness expansion—but Lyra understood what they were really selling.
A way out of the "UN"-quiet.
She clicked.
The website was simple. Too simple, maybe. Testimonials from people who talked about their lives in terms of "before" and "after." A registration form that asked questions she didn't know how to answer: What are you seeking? What are you ready to release?
She sat with her cursor hovering over the submit button for twenty minutes.
Then she thought about the next forty years of her life, lived exactly like this one. The same house. The same job. The same sound of nothing happening.
She clicked submit.
The deposit was non-refundable.
Good, she thought. Now she couldn't back out.
That night, she went home and made a decision she didn't fully understand.
She booked a flight.
She didn't tell anyone.
Not her mother. Not her coworkers. Not her friends. No one.
She didn't explain why.
She simply booked the ticket and paid for it with her own money, as if she had been saving for something without realizing it.
Brazil.
A ceremony.
A chance to look into the mirror and see what she might be missing.
She sat on her bed and stared at the confirmation email until her eyes burned.
Lyra closed her laptop.
She didn't sleep.
She couldn't, the possibilities could be limitless.