I went on a strange journey Friday night and I need to remember it.
My darling friend hosted a party in her apartment.
I am lucky to have a few people in my life where, sometimes when we touch, I lose myself and land in a cradle. Alchemy seems to happen in this space.
The space consisted of her big living room and a quiet bedroom with a big and very bouncy bed.
Every hour there was a raffle and a new DJ was selected.
I spent most of my time in the bedroom.
I'd love to write these stories in the same line that I used to back in the day. But I simply don't feel comfortable with talking in detail about other people on here at the moment.
A lot happened, but what I want to focus on is my 2-cb experience.
I had poured out some powder on the giant mirror that was going around. There were many colours and it was hard to see, but I measured out three lines. One for myself, and two for two strangers that I'd just met.
There's no scale present, I am already on a standard dose of MDMA. A South-African woman looks me directly into the eye and asks me if I could kindly make another line for her. Eyeballing the difference between 20mg and 50 mg in these conditions is not an easy task.
The red and the greens in the room are becoming extremely vivid. I am coming up both hard and fast.
I can't tell a linear story. I hope to catch onto the most surreal aspects, because, beside my DMT experience, I have not gone this deep on any psychedelic.
I have lost my pouch of things and I am searching for it as I am falling deeper and deeper. I know that all hope is lost of finding it and that I have at most a minute to go, as the room is suddenly filled with new bodies.
This wonderful Irish woman speaks to me in a gentle voice and uses her light to find my pouch with me. We stash it into my backpack and hide it back under the bed.
Thankfully, I did not go on this journey alone. The woman is comforting the first girl that I shared it with. The other guy, the South African woman, and I go on an inner journey that is fully blended with the outside environment. There were countless moments where we communicated to each other the shared presence of the other concurrent realities that we were taking part in.
These things have a way of staying hidden.
Communication can happen on so many levels that we are not currently aware of. It can be instantaneous, is the best I can say right now. But mutual belief is required.
When I fell to the bottom of my trip, all the words, reactions, and laughs that were happening in the room became stacks on stacks on stacks. Like the coding definition of a stack. Like scorecards that stacked up and passed. Automatic. Samsara. The human experience.
At some point I was a part of and witnessing the loop of human experience from the inside, but as a fly on the wall.
The banality of it. The dryness. Laughs and squirts and voices. Very normal people speaking in the ether. half-apologising for having their horn tooted. Their shared awareness of how dry and empty the actions and reactions were, but how they simply needed another go because they found it so funny.
There was endless synchronicity with the inside world and the outside world.
It was so up in my face that it was silly.
I was asking this question as I traveled deeper and further, "Who am I?" The observer part. I want to know already. Show me.
And I kept being shown, but I never had the insight.
I saw the infinite loop of birth and death and the meaning(lessness) of it all. Priest after priest blessing newborn babies and sending off dead bodies, their own love infusing the lived moment with vast realness.
I eventually managed to go pee.
As I peed, the whole universe coursed through my pee. A whole story that unfolded and perfectly finished as I unloaded my bladder. A very dry "meaning of it all" trip, start to finish.
I spend a lot of time, sadly, dealing with the South African woman.
She had seemed so confident, but now she was losing her marbles.
She was a philosopher and was stuck in a shame-loop about absurdity and asking philosophical questions.
It was difficult, because I am a mirror and she was a mirror.
My coping mechanism is to mirror people. To listen, because I am shameful about my own spontaneity.
When our mirrors met each other, nothing was happening. It was highly ironic. And uncomfortable, because she was pure reactivity and her reactions were not of the kind that easily yield to bouncing back and forth. It was simply pure reactivity, blocked out by the mental layer, which blocked streams of communication.
So I lost much valuable time there. But it was my responsibility.
Keeping with the same irony, this elf had found a penchant for me and was keeping me company at the same time.
He had an impressive skill for diving into other people and asking them questions that made them open up.
It was so hilarious. He was talking to these two DJs and he got them talking about this brand of music that they enjoyed so much.
I was looking up at them from below, and they looked like horses with several human mouths.
And I could see these free-spirits that were hiding in their mouths, the joy of creating this abstract and super-weird horse-music. The necessity for freedom of expression and the importance of holding our own and each other's shame.
I experienced over and over again how I had the urge to display my understanding of the weirdness that people were displaying around me, but each time I saw how the higher awareness of the people around me (or at least my perception of it) rendered my external shame response internally shameful.
I made my way to the bathroom again and stumbled face to face with the girl I had given 2-cb, now many hours ago. We locked onto each other and I was completely seduced by her micro-expressions and cat-like energy. We had spent time in the hole together and she called me the lizard king. Her and the guy had sobered up fairly much and he wanted more drugs from me. I really wanted to spend time with her and felt like I needed to get through him first, so I did.
I measured out another dose, and ended up giving another to another girl I am fond of, and ultimately some for myself.
I land back in the bed, suddenly face to face with the girl.
I couldn't make sense of her initially. She was purely playful and open, yet clearly guarded when her boundaries were touched. But her defenses were so soft.
Captivated by each other, she gradually opened up as we spoke and I listened.
In November of last year, she died.
Sometime around midnight, she had slipped, landed on her neck, broken it and her arm.
She tried to get back into the club. Adrenaline engulfing her body, she said she was fine. The ambulance was called. The ambulance found her so rude that they called the police on her. Finally her friends argued her case so strongly that they took her in.
She woke up some 6 days later. Piece by piece and in shambles. Her body needed to pee and her neck was twitching, but she could not turn around.
4 days later she has surgery and another two days later she can finally walk again.
6 more weeks of pain. The most intense pain you can imagine. Streaming up and down your neck. Every minute, each single second, of the most excruciating pain imaginable. Nothing helped.
Now she is unafraid. Jaded, but bottomless. Her eyelashes, the way her mouth curls, the knowing presence in her eyes.
She was finally happy. Moved around. Many relationships of all sorts. All kinds of jobs. Hand to mouth: self-preserved and self-made. She was living on her own and happy with herself in the world.
Then she fell and broke her neck on a midnight in November.
She told me that before then she was crippled by a fear of death.
The great irony was that when she did die, she had no memory if it. All the worrying had been for nothing.
She was a gardener and a ****tail waitress.
She wanted to go to Argentina. Now she's staying here for a while.
The only thing she now fears is love.
Looking at her face, I could look back and forth at her forever.
We are laughing and sharing stories and our conversation is perfectly flowing back and forth.
For hours. It's romantic and tender.
She had open heart surgery at the age of three.
I gently raise her chin, showing a red and bruised throat.
Her right thumb was almost twice the size of mine.
I asked her if I could take her on a date.
She quietly considered and gave her blessing. But not a date, "I don't do that romance."
A dinner.
"It's fine", she'd keep saying. Life passes through you and around you. Nothing lasts and nothing means anything, but you are a part of it and it is flowing around you. It works in mysterious ways and no one will ever understand it.
Everything that is happening around us changes meaning as we sit together. The people bouncing on the bed, conversations about kids, and the abundance of the future. I see how this cuts to her core. All the dreams that died with her that day. Now she can't even turn around and look the talking voices in the eye.
She told me how precious feelings were now. The potential freshness. How she feels fully that feeling when someone appreciates her.
She added my contacts and we shared a deep hug. I could feel it all as she passed through me. I am so sorry.
Unfortunately the irony didn't end there, as someone had mistaken their shoes for hers.
This broke the camel's back and she shut down and started crying with the few friends she had there remaining.
My roommates and the two other girls that I shared the trip with went home to mine as we fell asleep following the South African woman's philosophical lead, once again.
My dear friend gifted me a precious Terrence McKenna comic.
And that sweet girl, in her change of heart, unfollowed me.
It's fine.
