An afternoon twitches by, I barely notice.

Yet, the entire waking day for play crawls along inside the sweaty kitchen of my paid labor, That this is a job, not my work, is the distinction I make to fellow employees. They don't understand the difference, so drop the topic.

With every fiber of my mental tenacity focused to persist for eight hours, with bare hands burning carved carcasses and bitch face arresting the excited passion of coworkers, I'm left with nothing to share but my honest desperation that I need fundamental resources more than I need to live my life according to my self-determined morality. And I feel every minute. Time drenches awareness, a self-conscious torture of one thousand mental paper cuts.

Freedom does not amaze. It does not come packaged in spectacular colors. The most basic act of existing, I rarely even notice.

Always green, the hills prickle against the coastal wind, swaying. Dew collects along the white spines forested around us. Born here to eat along the endless bridges between leaf, a pulsing terrain with other hungry molds and beasts, we walk and eat our path. Leaf milk spills sticky and small white trails track our descent along the stem. When we are finished, only the stem will remain.

We all bleed the same.

The autumn sun casts maroon against the red clay earth that emits a damp fungal growth. Venomous, rabid, and habitually bold insects and rodents lay, patient, in burrows beneath thousands of bare feet slapping out rhythmic beats. Skin bodies, naked as infants and commonly so docile, weave all limbs like an ecstatic struggle.

We move at the corner of all eyes, at the edge of an idea hallucinated into future myths of phantasmic experiences.

Beyond the large altar of penetrating neon lights and orgiastic music, a fierce howl.

We do not exist until they see us, and then all they see is fear, teeth. All we see are guns.

We all bleed the same.

Against breast and shaded, Jeremy suckles underneath layers of paisley cotton. I relax against an old growth maple that has been anchored in this forest for almost two hundred years.

That is, according to the pamphlet Claudia handed to me at the festival gates. And now, the cell phone I intentionally lost deep within my shoulder bag has begun to sing its betrayal - a nostalgic track from an early Zelda game. I don't answer it. Instead, I press mute and continue to enjoy the distant shudder of electronic music mixed among breezes. A small green plant shivers stingers into the sack bound child.

Jeremy rages. The torment of a new sensation, this small prick on the thigh is agony.

My quiet ends.

We all bleed the same.