Plan B? We have a Plan B?

I thought of another escape. Panic slithered up my spine as my stomach churned with the poison I had fed it. Everything was mixing too much and I didnt like it.
This firework had just exploded.

I pictured myself driving across south america, and oh yeah I could feel it. Gringo, and the women. And the mota... Or walking through Japan, lumbering across the country as life sped by in a haze of neon. Or maybe break away from here, escape this, to Norway on a bicycle. Eyes paining me. Something else too.

It was raining on me as I typed. I had my eyes closed, concentrating on wherever everything was. No point trusting my eyes, not now. Maybe not ever again. A spatter of rain spiderwebbed across my forehead.
What is this, water torture now? What are they doing?

They're trying to drive me crazy.

I couldn't see them, but I could hear them. They had broken the skylight. I was sure of it. More noise. Maybe they had gotten in. I looked across the room.
Thank god.
Lyle. Holding a bible, with blood dripping down his arm. He was smeared in dirt from the plant which was watching us from the corner of the room, grunting and primal, stuck in his own trip. He was reading the book upside down, squinting occasionally, and catatonically lurching, as if being poked by hot coals.

Panic subsided and I felt safe again. I took a quick swig of whatever was in the bottle nearest to me. I was trying to make out the name, but more sentences formed above and below and it was impossible. Too many symbols from my past, just floating there in space, and this bottle was somehow the key. I drained it dry. I tried to put myself somewhere else. Just for a few hours. Just till this hideous fever subsided and I could get something done. Something...

From those glorious hazy days, slipping further and further away.
2 years. 3 years maybe, since that haze faded. That glorious tingle that felt like we were all at the centre of something, that life would really work out for us, that we were basking in the sunshine, and somehow, it would never set.

It was something to be part of, the growing friends, stories, ideas and dreams. Creating roots, linking them, so they would never die.

It was all coming together over us, and we were just waiting for the world, we could take on anything. We had no fear.
From that great time of free thought, many years after that way of life imploded, and there could be no going back, to now, the reality.
We hadnt changed the world. Our mighty roots died and withered with time. We had gotten so far away from the world, it seemed impossible to start again, to return to families, get a job, work hard for little money and be a part of a society we had spent so long ignoring.
The only laws we broke were drug laws. We didnt want to change the world, we didnt want to change anything, we just thought that we could find a way round.

So many days, since way back then, when panic crept up my spine. It infected my brain, drunk on fear, with nothing else.
But society does not easily suffer dreamers, and so I was, three years after the world stopped making sense. A degree on the wall, a head full of drugs, a half tank of petrol, and an empty feeling like everything I had worked for was destroyed, had never existed.
And I was playing their game again.
Feeling like I won't survive by playing by their rules.