When I took LSD last week at the
Carnival of Electric Illusions, I found that it became an apt metaphor for my
situation with my ex-girlfriend, with whom I had broken up just over a week
before. This trip started at around 7:30 PM,
I took it with my ex-girlfriend at her new boyfriend’s place. Now I’m very
emotionally strong, and I hadn’t been overly upset about the break up until I
saw her with him and hung out with them that afternoon. I was a little down,
but I was still coping okay. The shisha cheered me up a little. I digress. The
tab took quite a while to really take hold. I believed this batch to be not too
strong, but sort of in a way where I knew I could handle it. It was probably
around 9 before I really lost my mind, but it was there, it had taken hold and
there was nothing I could do but submit. In a similar way, the reality of
losing the one I love came over me, and it was inescapable.
Let me preface this by explaining
why we broke up and why she has a new boyfriend already. I dated her for 3 years
and 3 months, and we had decided to take a break, because she wanted to prove
to herself that there was no one else for her. I wanted her to get this out of
her system, so I let her go with it. Then she meets Kit, and they instantly hit
it off. So she samples him out, and after like, two weeks, he forces her to
make a premature decision. I didn’t really want this, but honestly, the concept
of being single kind of excited me, further, I could see he could be a
boyfriend I couldn’t, so I encouraged her to choose him, for her sake. I’m a
little scant on the details as I’ve had to explain this to many people. That’s
the basic gist of it.
I watch several episodes of
Scrubs, each becoming progressively more confusing and hard to understand. The
sadness of the characters and the serious situations in which they find
themselves are the only things I can understand, and this becomes difficult to
watch; I can feel their negative vibes. My ex and her Kit are also hard to
watch. I try to tune this out.
After a while, Kit’s friend comes
over, and they each have a line of coke. We roll out at around 10, and walk to
this club, about 15 minutes away, where the Carnival of Electric Illusions is.
This month’s carnival is a Halloween theme, although it’s not Halloween and every
month encourages people to wear costumes.
The ensuing few hours are
relatively uneventful for me, mostly involving me sitting on a couch outside being
cold and trying to understand the true nature of this event. I know 4 or so
people outside of my entourage. Most of the people there are friends of the
organizers, or at least 2 or 3 degrees away from them, so I get a feeling of
community from this place. However, I don’t know these people, so it would be
weird for me to talk to a lot of them, although the vibes are generally good.
This thought process hurts my head, so I try to think of other things. I try to
explain these thoughts to those around me, but they are ineffable.
We are told to move from “the
stage”. So we do, and this really strange play is put on my two people in giant
skull masks, and this sparely dressed woman, at whom many on-looking women hurl
friendly requests for the performer to disrobe. These people obviously know
this woman.
I can’t work out the plot of the
play, it has something to do with the masked men trying finding the woman when
they are shipwrecked or something, and they try to eat her. She holds up signs
saying “More organs!??” or something like that. This confuses the hell out of
me. I’m sort of relieved when it’s over, because it was not particularly
interesting to sit there watching something I couldn’t understand.
I have a cigarette and dance a
bit to keep warm. After a while, I express my interest to leave, but Kit and
his friend have taken pills so they wish to stay a little longer. My ex and I
talk a little about how we miss each other, and she too wants to leave. We’re
both still feeling the acid strongly, and still seeing movement in the
floorboards.
After a while we start walking
back to Kit’s place. We have some shisha and listen to music for a couple of
hours. During this time, my ex becomes particularly emotional, and tears seem
to appear most of the times she looks at me. This starts to distress me. I
explain that I probably won’t write a trip report this time because nothing
much happened. She reminds me of the crazy play, and I say that it didn’t make
sense to me, and it wasn’t important. I explain that I did not reach any
profound revelations during the trip. At this point she becomes a little angry
with me, and starts crying, wondering why I didn’t have any revelation about
how I miss her. I tell her that I already knew I had made a mistake to let her
go. I didn’t really realise it, but I was actually in the process of fully
realizing that at the time.
This sort of banter continued,
and the vibes were deteriorating, as was my energy. Suddenly my ex decides she
needs to “do something she should have done a long time ago” and go to bed. And
she rushes upstairs without saying good night. This upsets me, but I’m still a
little unsure if that was completely abnormal. I later conclude it is a little.
Once I realise she isn’t coming
back down until the morning, I go to bed. In bed, I can see myself going across
the SydneyHarbourBridge like I was earlier in the day.
I have some amazing closed-eyed visuals, most of which I’ve now forgotten. I
think about my ex and if I’ve really made a mistake, and I decide I have.
Acid helped me gain a real
clarity about this problem, however, the next day, I feel so depressed about
this realization. It’s as if the truth was too much for me. I beg my ex to come
back to the Blue Mountains with me, where we both live, but she wants to stay
with Kit longer. I felt like shit the entire train trip home.
I don’t regret taking acid that night.
Maybe I regret spending time with my ex while she’s with her new boyfriend. It
did make me realise how much I miss her, which is a truth I must face. Most
importantly, however, I realised that I was human, and that I felt emotions,
the velocity of which I did not know I possessed. This is one of the most
important lessons one can learn.
