The Lever (excerpt from (THE THIRD MOVEMENT) (c) 2019

“There’s a lever, a thought, that is pulled in the mind that tells us when we are
doing something that we shouldn’t be doing. When using I learned to ignore
that lever. That lever pulled can also be referred to as inhibitions.
The counselor told me I had a problem. But I wasn’t having any of that.
I told her I just enjoyed drinking.” Howard was now wiping the tears out of his
eyes as he remembered the scene. A scene like it was watching someone
else. Howard wondered if he had such a lever in his brain.
Felicia patted him on the back, “It takes a while to get it back.
We call it 'progress rather than perfection.’”

    ***

Whispers came through The Owner’s mind. Bringing him back to logic.
The Owner was becoming familiar with another type of lever. One in
which conscious familiar thought, a memory comes. He remembered
the name ‘Beatrice’ he heard in junior high school. The teacher’s name
was Misses Herring. She was overweight, and looked almost exactly
like the Beatrice in his vision.
“So who can tell me about Beatrice?” She asked.
The Owner remembered everything in her classroom. The meant
to be inspiring photos of writers in the room. Among the photos was
Mark Twain. He remembered looking at Twain and thinking about how
much Albert Einstein looked like Mark Twain.
It was a significant day because this was the first time The Owner
had been high. Him and his friend Heath got high off of weed that
Heath found on the hallway floor. "Why don’t you tell me Beatrice’s role
in ‘The Divine Comedy?’” Misses Herring hardly ever called on him.
With that moment he felt as if he had been caught. The Owner

wondered if that incident shaped everything else in his life. Many
would say that hell is a personal specialized catered dimension.
A dimension in which one stays imprisoned in their ‘worst memory,
worst feeling’-he smiled thinking logically that this couldn’t possibly
be his hell. All that it was, he became aware, was the lever. The lever
was pulling him back to reality. Like a dream, when sleeping, things
are out of place centered upon one logical thing, event, or and a thing
and an event. Like a forceful blow to your abdomen. It takes your breath
away. That’s how he felt when he returned back from astral projection.

“WAKE UP CONVICT!” The guard screamed from the other side of
the door. “BREAKFAST TIME!” With that the guard threw the
styrofoam cup filled with

apple juice at him.

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