THE ACTIVIST - WO #4

Ayahuasca (pronounced 'eye-ah-WAH-ska') is a plant-based psychedelic. Psychedelics affect all the senses, altering a person's thinking, sense of time and emotions. They can cause a person to hallucinate—seeing or hearing things that do not exist or are distorted. - Alcohol And Drug Foundation

When she glimpsed her future after participating in an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica, she heard lots of banging of drums and sorrowful wailing and could see herself screaming loudly in the streets of London. She didn't know what it meant back then but trusted in the vision and eventually found the reality to match it after joining the Green Bloc activist group that demanded the British Government take emergency action to reverse climate change before the environmental apocalypse threatened to destroy humanity.

It was Wednesday and drizzling with a thin rain that epitomised the mid week malaise in the small rural town which appeared to have the same ten people circulating its streets on a permanent loop. As Clare stirred her plant milk cappuccino in the organic cafe she'd practically turned into her office she felt a sense of forlornless. She'd noticed she often felt like this between demonstrations. Each time she'd met up with her fellow activists there was a sense that they were unstoppable, like a force of nature. When she was alone, however, away from her fellow rebels, she was reminded of her all too human frailties and complex, messy personal life.

Belonging to a group like the Green Bloc made her feel strong and each time they'd pushed the envelope in terms of the scale, size and extremism of their protests she felt increasingly empowered. It was a euphoric feeling that easily surpassed her attempts at tantric sex with her yoga teacher ten years earlier before he disappeared to Mexico shortly after carrying out the abortion they'd both celebrated. Now Myles ran the Lost Souls retreat in San Miguel de Allende in the far eastern part of Guanajuato where people looking to find themselves would end up paying several thousand pounds for the privilege. He'd wrote in an email to her that he would happily give her a 50% discount if she ever felt inclined to come out to do his life changing course.

She politely declined. Thankfully, Clare had now found something to replace the brief happiness she'd shared with Myles and thought only of him occasionally on those rare, hot summer nights when she couldn't sleep and recalled their marathon nights of elaborate intimacy together. But he was gone now and she'd moved on. She'd found something that had replaced their brief glimpses of erotic ecstasy into a more sustained and virtuous feeling of engagement. But as her overpriced slice of carrot cake broke into a crumbly mess under the pressure of her strangely heavy fork she felt lost suddenly, as if the realisation that the only way she could sustain this elevated feeling of positive energy with the Green Bloc was by remaining permanently active in protest 24/7.

It was only two days ago she had glued herself to a city bank glass door and had made it as awkward as possible for customers and workers to access the building. With each revolve of the door, she felt as if she had finally bent the world to her will. The suppressive patriarchy that had controlled her life's narrative was no longer and it was only later that day, when the police tried to ease her hand from the door with soapy water and a spatula, that she sensed the pending crash from her almighty high.

"Are you reading that newspaper?"

Clare looked up to the bespectacled, white bearded man who stood over her with noticably pungent garlic breath.

"No. You're welcome to it. I don't think it's today's, even."

As she passed him the coffee stained paper, he noticed her sore looking, skin peeled hand.

"Oof! That looks nasty!"

And in a moment of near cosmic serendipity, he then observed her face on the front page of Tuesday's newspaper that her hand had covered.

"Wait. Is that you?"

Clare smiled proudly. "Why, yes it is."

"That would explain your hand, then."

Looking at the photo of Clare being un-glued by police the elderly, pony tailed man was suddenly lost for words, as if in the presence of a movie star.

"Was it this Monday? I wanted to go to that but I had to attend a funeral of a friend. Ironically, the friend was a climate activist and would have preferred we'd all done something for the planet rather than waste time gathered to celebrate her life. She would have seen it all as rather wasteful."

Nodding solemnly in complete understanding of the old man's point, Clare offered a solution.

"Perhaps you can consider what I did as representing your friend somehow."

The old man smiled revealing a mouth full of rotten teeth.

"Oh, Jane would have loved that. You would have gotten on famously I believe. You even look alike. Or at least you look like how Jane looked when I first met her in the early 1980's. We were protesting for nuclear disarmament back then."

Although Clare was flattered to be compared to someone this man clearly respected and admired, she somehow felt unnerved being possibly too alike to the deceased lady.

"Did she have a partner when she died?"

"Oh no. She hated men. Thought they were the root of all evil. They only reason she liked me was because I renounced my toxic masculinity in a community exercise one evening up on Mayflower Peak. We made paper mache casts of our genitals and burnt them on the fire. It was very carthartic. I felt duly atoned."

Clare noticed a urine stain on the man's trousers and suddenly felt a little queasy. It was all too much, what with the teeth, the stain and the garlic.

"Excuse me. I need to use the bathroom."

"By all means. Keep fighting the good fight Warrior Queen!"

In the tiny box-like toilet, Clare splashed some cold water on her face.

She looked into the mirror at her reflection and suddenly she felt as if she was being sucked into a vortex of the past where she was returned to Costa Rica, finding herself back in the red tent where she'd had her original vision of the future.

Sobbing and disorientated having been returned to Costa Rica, Clare was attended to by a trained facillitator who came into the tent to reassure her.

"Don't fight the visions. Just go with them."

Now uncertain which time continium she was in, all Clare could think about was her half eaten carrot cake back at the table in the cafe.

Suddenly she felt a long way from home and the future was now even further away.