Well, I've been thinking about recording this for a long time, so I might as well start now. (Be warned, it's quite a read, but I organized it as best I could).
I can remember crisply the events leading up to my first trip.
I was seventeen, had been smoking marijuana steadily for three years, and had finally decided to eat mushrooms the winter of 2004. I don't remember what exactly convinced me. I had never really been against hallucinogens, but always a bit apprehensive of the unknown, as most of us are. I remember my boyfriend at the time, C, had done a small amount of them one afternoon while I was at his house with a couple of his friends. He probably did not even pass a Level 1 trip, but he had ADHD so it was hard to tell. He was intensely fascinated with the snow falling, and knowing what I know now, I can't blame him. So, that being my only previous experience with someone tripping, I was not too worried.
We obtained the mushrooms from a trusted friend of C's. An eighth for each of us. They were all about 2-4 inches long, had decent sized caps, and were a grayish white hue. (It's amazing how clearly I can still picture the bag of them after almost three years). I do not know what type of mushroom they were, and once again, knowing what I know now, I never would have eaten the whole eighth my first time.
C and I went to his house which, looking back, is an ideal location for shrooming. He lives with his mum and younger brother on a Christmas Tree Farm started by his grandparents. His grandmother lived on the bottom level of the house and is very sweet. His mother is a school teacher so was gone during the day and even when she was home she mostly left us to ourselves. There were acres and acres of land exploding with nature to explore! If only we had stayed there...We were alone when we made peanut butter sandwiches and loaded them with the shrooms. I remember it took me a ridiculous amount of chewing and mouthfuls of water to get it down, it didn't taste too bad, but an eighth of mushrooms with bread and peanut butter?! You might as well eat cardboard. So i ate it. I don't remember much from the next hour except for a lot of sitting in anticipation with a slight stomach cramp, feeling disappointed and bored. (I interject here with the memory that I had drank mushroom tea at least three times on separate occasions before with no effects, tried smoking pot with it too, to no effect, while the other three to five people I was with all tripped quite decently and had a grand time of it.) C, on the other hand, was starting to trip pretty good and was quite restless. He decided we should go over to our friend J's, who is my best friend, so I did not object.
We arrived at her house where we proceeded to hang out in her upstairs room and smoke some weed. She had a rather small room covered in posters with two twin beds set into a corner to form an L. After a couple of hours C convinced J to let him play some of his music, so he got up to go get his Cd's from his car. He walked the 10 or so feet to the top of the stairs which are directly across from the door of J's room and stopped. He slowly turned around and I did not recognize the boy I saw. He had gone even paler than usual and his eyes were glazed over, looking much like a freshly turned zombie. He began to stumble/shuffle his way back to J's room and all I could do was stare at him confused and probably question him while giggling, seeing as I was quite stoned by this time. When he was about 2 feet into the room he collapsed, fell into J's dresser, then onto her bed (only his upper torso) and then onto the wood floor with a smacking thud I don't think I'll ever forget. I remember giggling, out of fear, not humor, as J and I rushed to his side. And as I approached his unconscious face sideways on the floor he stopped breathing. 1...2...3...it seemed like an eternity as we pounded the floor and screamed his name, telling him to come back, but it was probably only seconds before he gasped in an enormous intake of breath. He quickly came to but did not move immediately asking, "What's going on? Where am I? What happened? Why am I on the floor?" J and I quickly informed him he was tripping on mushrooms, had gone to get some Cd's, gotten to the stairs, come back in the room, and collapsed. And then, the roller coaster began.
It's amazing how tragedy and grief expand our perception of time. I had thought he had died. I was sure of it. My head had screamed, "Holy shit. I ate mushrooms with my boyfriend and it killed him. And I'm not even tripping." I sat back after I was sure he was alive and well and he was slowly coming to a sitting position. My breathing was coming faster and shorter. I was having a panic attack which often results in hyperventilation for me. (I've had panic attacks and anxiety/depression issues since I was 13, so was usually able to control them rather well, but thinking my boyfriend had just died on the floor in front of me was too much for me to handle.) I sat with my arms around my legs hyperventilating and crying, not sobbing, but with a good stream of tears. C and J immediately rushed to my side quickly forgetting all previous drama and tried to console me. I knew I was being irrational and that C was fine and there was no reason to fret and I told them why I was so upset through tears and gasps for air and began to regain composure after a few minutes with the aid of their condolences.
As I climbed onto the bed something strange happened. The room became fuzzier and warm, almost like it was pressing in on me with millions of tiny tiny little particles, and everything looked like one of those pictures taken with long time exposure where the image overlaps a dozen or so times in a row so there are multiples of everything. And then I was sitting on the bed, saying something like, "Whoa that was weird it was just like I was-" and then bwoop! I would be back to the slightly claustrophobic world of panningness. "But wait, I'm just sitting here normal, nothings going on-" I would think, and then bwoop! once again, I was back. After about the third wave I remember stating, "J, I think I'm tripping", with a shaky voice.
Ah, what an understatement that was. I tried to be calm and take it all in stride, convincing myself, "Yea, this is cool. This is fun. I'm really diggin'' these trails...", but the waves threw my confidence. Also, during this a girl named L, a friend of J's and a somewhat friend of mine, but I hadn't known her for that long, showed up and was quickly informed that I was tripping. I was not too fond of this unexpected and new addition to my surroundings. I was riding the waves pretty hard and during my 'downs' would be disoriented like I had just woken up, saying things like, "Wait, was I just like, tripping? I was wasn't I?!" and then bwoop! I would be 'up' again. After this things get really muddy. (I'm beginning to become pained from remembering this in such extensive detail, so I will be a bit less descriptive from now on.)
I don't know how long the waves went on, but I remember it was extremely discomforting as it was causing me to be so disoriented. I believe it was about 5 PM when I entered the steady part of my trip. I was stationed in the corner of the room in the middle of the 'L' beds. One bed stretching to my right, one stretching away to my left. (J's house was a popular hang out for our wide ranging group of friends. J is an easily lovable person and at this point in time people would just show up to hang out with no notice at all. She lives alone with her grandmother who would hardly monitor us at all, so we got away with a lot.) So I'm really trippin' balls as more and more people are showing up, I knew all of them and all of them had tripped before, but none of them gave me any support. Much of J's room was decorated with Halloween stuff and there was a particularly large, hairy spider hanging from the light in the middle of the ceiling. It was probably 6" across at the body with foot long legs and red eyes. I was gazing at it curiously when L told me if I reached up and pulled it, it would look like the ceiling was stretching down. So I did, and nothing spectacular happened, I kind of giggled and sat back down. Then L leaned over and whispered menacingly, "Look. It's coming down to get you." I giggled and turned to look. And holy shit it was. I freaked a bit, started crying, and scooted as far into the corner of the wall as I could. Spiders are fine with me at a distance, but I Hate when I find them on me. I don't remember anything else until a while later when there are 8 other people in this tiny ass room with me (along with panic attacks I am prone to social anxiety/mild claustrophobia when stressed, and I was quite stressed by this point). My friend J is nowhere to be seen. She told me later that I had been freaking out and she had tried to calm me down and I had punched her in the face and so she had left the room. I had been tripping internally for most of the time and only 'surfaced' for brief moments. I will now describe some of the things I experienced, but I have no clue what order I experienced them in, so bare with me.
At one point I was wishing everyone would leave me alone and then, extremely rapidly, people started leaving the room. I remember there was something especially disturbing about the way they would look at me and shut the door firmly and quickly, almost like they were plotting, trapping me there (which was not far from the truth as they refused to let me go outside, which was all I really wanted, to be in the woods). Shortly thereafter everything started rewinding. Events racing past me as I sat in my corner helpless to do anything but endure watching my life go backwards until I returned to the womb (an extremely painful experience I might add).
At another point I was staring at the ceiling light which was a plain white glass square with black light bulbs behind it giving it a purple effect and making the multi-colored stars glow and dance even in the daytime. It was one of the few pleasant moments I remember. But as the violet hue became brighter and brighter a strange and horrible thing happened. I realized there was some clue, some link between the colors violet and and white and stars and squares and triangles and circles and all matter of shapes and geometry and colors, etc. etc. But as I was realizing this my body started contorting itself, out of my control. Twisting and crunching as it tried to make itself smaller and smaller and smaller. I knew that my body wanted to become nothing, to compact until it had become nothing at all, and holy fuck if that wasn't the most painful thing I have ever experienced.
Then, my friends are around me. Talking about me. I could see everything and hear everything, but I could not move. They were talking about how rough it was for me and saying things like, "Oh, it's her first time." And making faces of sympathy and pity. And then I was sweating bullets, gagging, sitting up, and there my friends were. Calming me, soothing me, holding me as I retched over and over and over again. (I never did actually throw up my whole trip). Explaining that, that was just really how things were. That that was the real world, and I had been living in lie. And that was why the government had made so many drugs illegal, so we wouldn't know the truth. That everything was infinite and painful and joyous and never ending and that anything, ANYTHING was, is, and always has been possible. Some drugs were tainted and were not the truth of course, but marijuana and mushrooms were among the purest truth tellers, they just took you to different levels of 'reality'. (There were many other things I experienced and 'learned' while in this 'truth' room, but many of them are too graphic and horrible for me to commit to this telling.) I do remember thinking, "Oh shit. I'm going to do this again someday. I don't want to, but fuck, I know I will."
The last thing I 'experienced' that I will share was one of the weirdest of them all. I was alone, sitting indian style a few feet to the left from the corner where I was actually stationed, and looking down at my shirt, which I remember as pale yellow. There was a loose thread on it and when I pulled it, it began unraveling. Only, it wasn't just my shirt that was unraveling. I was unraveling my physical self. And I could feel it. You know how it feels when you get a long hair in your mouth and it takes you forever to actually find the thing and grab it and then when you start to pull it out you realize you've swallowed part of it and it pulls out of your throat and across your tongue and leaves a thin, sharp, tingling, numb feeling? Well that's what my whole body felt like as I unraveled myself. My memory of that experience stops when the thread reaches my tongue and I can distinctly feel it there, even now. (Needless to say, nowadays when I do get a hair in my mouth it bugs me out a bit.) I know this is dragging on a bit, but I make no apologies as this is for the sake of accurate documentation and you could have stopped reading (and can still!) whenever you so felt the need.
A number of hours into my trip, some of the 8 other people in the room tried to get me to drink milk thinking that it would cause my trip to end sooner. I forgot to mention that before I went completely internal I was asking them if I was going to die and they so kindly responded with, "You might." So I did not trust them very much, at all. And I hate milk. And they were trying to force me to drink the milk. I could not see them by this point, but I could here them and I remember a whiteness being shoved in my face. I was firmly responding with, "No. No, I don't want the milk," rather calmly too, considering everything I'd been through by this point. But still they persisted, convinced it would solved everything. The more they persisted and the pushier they became, the less I trusted them. Until I was convinced the milk was poisoned and they all just wanted me to die. At this point the only things I would say were, "Fuck the milk! I don't want the fucking milk!" And still they persisted, but still I responded, "Fuck the fucking milk! I don't want your fucking milk! Fuck off!" I was pretty fucking angry by this point. Around this time, J returned, I'm guessing due to the commotion, and told them to quit trying to force me to drink milk.
I don't know what happened after that, except that all of the sudden I'm 'waking up' in the corner of J's room surrounded by people who tell me that I've just tripped my ass off and gone completely off the scale of sane and it's 11 PM and my parents called about 30 minutes ago wondering where I was and I'm wearing this really nice red corset shirt with flowy sleeves and I go look in the mirror and I look normal but strung out and my hair's everywhere and I'm completely embarrassed and just want to crawl in a hole and sleep forever and never have to think again or see the light of day or hear another fucking human voice and oh yea, I've found out life's a joke and I've been lied to for 17 years, my whole fucking life, what the fuck is the point, and I just want to vomit and go to sleep.
Somehow I got home, I don't remember if I drove or if C dropped me, who, by the way, was apparently near me my whole trip but I don't have one memory of him being there at all except for when I was in the 'truth' room and when I 'surfaced' at 11 PM bewildered and full of ego and some scattered, haggard sense of self. And somehow I made up a stupid lie and hid all this from my parents and went home and went to bed and I'm assuming I just zonked out because I don't really remember much after I left J's house.
And, holy shit I can't believe I finally got all that down, almost three years later.
I've tripped three times since then, but those are other horrifying and interesting stories for later. This took me hours to type.
I would appreciate any insight or any sort of comment on any of this as long as it is not too unkind or rude. I already know the major mistakes I made, and the mistakes of others, I have had plenty of time to figure those things out. But, I am still quite sensitive about the whole thing. And if you made it this far, thank you, for donating a little bit of your life to learning about something that was a truly significant event in mine. I'd give you a joint and hug if I could. Namaste.
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