I’ve taken psychedelics a handful of times. The first few times were awe-inducing, grand, beautiful, insurmountable. The last time felt somewhat limp – as if I was made to witness the very death of my own imagination.
Regardless, each time, I come down from my trips grateful my conscious self is able to experience such states at all. When life then hands me such states in full sobriety, I am even more grateful.
After first meeting, JP and I spent hours staring into each other’s eyes, as you do when enamored with another soul. A special quality of presence would emerge between us – whatever overlays we’d been emitting in daily life gone, in their place, the other human lay fully, entirely bare.
Sometimes I get this sense that the world around me is still rendering, the pixels not yet fully loaded, the landscapes around me foggy. I feel as if I am in perpetual need of taking a big breath, or a big yawn, to finish the rendering process. In these moments with JP, life felt entirely crisp.
Inside these states of heightened presence, a subtle, mystical state of hallucination would be induced. I began seeing people, faces, and figures overlaid on top of him – his face melting away into ancient, religious, and prehistoric forms. During the first few hallucinations, I watched him morph into Jesus Christ, Adam (counterpart to Eve), and his hair into a Medusa-like string of snakes. He reported seeing similar hallucinations – regal queens and princesses, old, prehistoric women, often elderly – all of an ancient source.
Each time, our hallucinations appeared to mirror one another – living in a shared liminal space that emerged seemingly only in our intertwining.
Once, I took shrooms while lying in JP’s arms on the lawn of a castle in Belgium. When I looked up at him, I saw a noble king, sturdy in his will, at peace with himself, respected by all the men and women of the kingdom. No matter the source of the hallucination, with JP, it was always historical, primordial.
After the first few months together, slowly and gradually, I lost this hallucinatory ability. In spite of starting an active meditation practice, I simply could no longer access this state of heightened concentration. Had too many overlays, scripts, and performances been built up? What was blocked in me, what was blocked in him? Had I lost access to this sense of presence forever? Only now does this feeling emerge that somewhere along the line, we lost access to each other. I wonder if we ever had access at all.
After breaking up (again), he asked if we could see each other one last time, for a final goodbye. At this point, I decided to follow my heart, rather than any societally-prescribed-norms-of-no-contact. I’m glad that I did. We sat on the once-longest bench in the world, the bench we’d always go to observe the world – exchanging words, looks, and glances one last time.
After months of failing to hallucinate, images finally began to appear again. This time, I saw a monkey-like Neanderthal, with curly brown hair, holding a slight smile, as if just awoken; the final evolutionary step before the emergence of modern man. Innocent and pure, all-knowing and knowing of nothing at all.
As much as I have tried to pull myself towards him, it appears the universe does not want us to be together right now. Wherever our story ends, I’ll always hold dear this ancient space that emerged between us – a space of otherworldly wonder, imagination, and quiet; a space as old as love can be.
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