Is This It?

Was this really what it was meant to be?

You lose yourself to the haze, too—but unlike the others, you occasionally breach the murky water, like a whale surfacing for just long enough to catch a glimpse of the unobstructed sky. Is that really unlike the others? Do they know, too? Does everyone know, and they simply don’t say a thing?

Whatever the case, you know what you see. As you sit up, in a blink of fleeting lucidity, you look around at a whole lot of people who are very much high off of what you’ve given them. Candlelight blooms through thick smog, a vial of sickly dark fluid boiling off and swallowing the room in its fumes. They talk, but lucid as you are for this moment, you recognize that not a lot of the words that come out of their mouths mean anything.

You remember the original intention of your work. You remember sitting criss-cross in front of a little bottle just like that one, in the open wilderness. You remember drawing careful, measured breaths of the intoxicating runoff, and feeling yourself weigh into the earth. You remember dragging your fingers through the dirt, and for the first time feeling it vibrate at your control.

And now… here you are. Surrounded by people with no magical intentions, no higher purpose for this concoction, just huffing it until they can no longer hear the background buzz. And you, among them.

Is this what you were meant to do? Is this what your gifts have been leading up to?

…

You look over, and see River. They’re not talking to anyone, of course. This sort of thing is hardly their scene. But… they’re not as curled into themselves as they usually are. Instead of staring a hole into the floor waiting for all of this to pass, their eyes flit back and forth between those holding half-incoherent conversation. Their fingers don’t fidget at their clothes.

You sigh, looking aside.

Maybe this really is a worthy cause.

It’s a shame that answer wouldn’t satisfy you forever.