July 25th, 2012

“Negative thought loops,” Chris called them. It’s when your mind constantly thinks the same thing over and over again while on LSD. They kind of okay when they’re positive but frightening when they’re negative. Both are still scary because it makes you feel like you’re stuck in time and the trip will never end. Chris said, “Just have a positive mindset and you’ll be fine. You’ll have me to guide you through it.” This is what he said when I put the little piece of paper on my tongue.

It tasted like nothing.

We were in the tree house. This was something I always wanted to try because health class always made it seem fun. I mean who doesn’t want to hear colors and see sound? I always thought the way they tried to scare us seem counter-intuitive, at least for LSD.

I didn’t really feel anything for an hour, but a bit after I felt the warmth Chris was talking about. This followed by the woods getting a bit brighter and a bit of nauseousness. This is what Chris is supposed to be on every single day as everyone has told me.

At first, I didn’t feel anything so different. Then in one second, I realized how different everything was. It felt like I was inside my own head, viewing the world in from the inside. The trees, the bushes, the water, the sky, it all changed and it was all beautiful. It changed constantly to the sounds I heard. Trees leaves and branches became birds just by their chirping. I thought about cats, so everything became kittens.

Everything about it was enjoyable until Chris took me out of the forest. He kept talking, guiding me through this experience to make sure I wasn’t going into negative thoughts.

He said, “A lot of people use this to get a better understanding of themselves.” So I thought of that and only that.

I was home laying down on my living room sofa. Chris had left me alone for quite some time. Time seemed so irrelevant because everything felt so eternal. Five minutes seemed to last for hours. I knew then that everything seemed so pointless because there was no definite answer to anything.

Who did I want to be?

I was stuck on this question for a long time in a thought loop if you will.

Who I wanted to be?

Who am I?

What am I?

Does it even matter?

No, it doesn’t matter.

I know who I am.

I’m broken.

I broke myself.

Why am I remembering that? Why do I remember what I did? Is it because that’s what I’m running away from? No.

I’m running away from lots of things.

There was a suicide a year and a half ago. There was this girl named Caroline in our grade sophomore year. She didn’t do anything to us. She didn’t do anything to me. Caroline kept to her own business and it’s my fault for intruding in her life like I did.

The walls closed in as if they were going to swallow me whole. It felt amazing. I felt sober and so out of the world at the same time

I invited Caroline to sit with us at lunch one day. She invited me to hang out with her in her house another.

She became a friend.

I betrayed her.

I found messages of the group chat she was part of. She constantly had threesomes and foursomes. I found prescription pills to help with depression. I thought it was funny to replace them with sugar pills. I found suicide notes that I stole. I planned to make them public by having copies posted all over the school lockers.

I don’t know why.

My body became cold. I started hearing things that weren’t there. They called me a blue flower. Things became electric.

In a party, we played ‘Never have I ever’. I forced Caroline to admit she had a foursome. The whole thing became a slut-shaming fiasco that forced her to move schools. Nobody talked to her anymore.

The pills that I stole turned out to help her keep her suicidal thoughts at bay. It wasn’t until two months later that we would all learn that she committed suicide by drug overdose. Nobody suspected me. They all thought that it was everyone’s fault, not mine.

But I’m the sole person to blame.

And now I feel utterly disgusted by it. Back then, I didn’t care. Life was meaningless to me.

Now that whole thing is circling back because life felt meaningless again.

I jumped back to this fake reality where the was nothing but silence. I was alone.

Alone.

I thought about where I was going in my life. I had broken my own morals and lost my sense of purpose. I knew that much. I didn’t want to go to college because I knew I could never decide on what I wanted to do for a living. I knew if I went to school I’ll just be wasting money I could never pay back. I knew that after high school my social status wouldn’t mean a thing. I knew everyone was a snake one way or the other. I knew I was in the tall grass, whatever that meant.

I knew that I had no fucking idea why I was so afraid of the future.

When I was little I used to cry for my dad whenever I woke up in the middle of the night because I was thirsty. I was too afraid to walk in the dark to the kitchen. I always thought a monster lurked in the shadows. But now my dad’s gone with some other woman in Seattle and we don’t talk as much as I liked to.

Not that he isn’t a bad person, it’s just that I’m the bad person.

Perhaps that’s why I’m scared of things I can’t see.

I got a text from Andrew. I get my drugs tomorrow and had sent me a location to meet them up. The digital words moved around and started to dance. I laughed because I seemed to be staring at the phone for a long while.

I had found my answer.

I decided that it didn’t matter what the future held, I just wanted to have as much fun now as I could possibly have. After all, there wasn’t much else to do.

In my room, there was this woman in a white dress standing in front of and looking at my Emmah poster. She had the same stunning dress as the one Emmah had. This woman was blonde however and looked nothing like her. I didn’t know who she was.

“Life is beautiful. Really, it is,” She said in an almost angelic voice. I don’t think she was ever real. The woman seemed to be a bit transparent and somehow I didn’t mind that she was in my room. The colors coming around her were friendly.

I recognized her words. They’re from a movie Cody and I watched a while back. The words she spoke startled me like she knew exactly what to say to get inside my own head.

“Life is great,” She continued.

The movie was ‘Gummo’. A movie that made me weirdly fascinated after finishing it.

“Without out it, you’ll be dead,” I finished for her.

“Life is beautiful, really, it is. Filled with beauty and illusions,” The woman walked up to me and hugged me.

And an explosion of memories all at once. I remembered everything and all things at once. Things I was never there for, things I wasn’t even born for. An explosion of emotions and ecstasy. I saw all the good, all the bad. I saw the world without me. I saw the world with me. Either way, it kept spinning.

I saw hollow eyes with somber grins. I saw worn eyes with calm and warming smiles. I saw scared eyes and a calendar date, August 27th. I saw pissed off eyes just longing for someone to say “It’s okay.” I saw demons surrounding eyes of curiosity. I saw Cody’s eyes longing for everything to go back to the things they were.

I walked into my room again.

In my room, there was this woman in a white dress standing in front of and looking at my Emmah poster. She was wearing the same dress as the poster and her blonde hair was perfectly straight.

“Life is beautiful. Really, it is,” She said in an Angelic voice. “Life is great,”

“Without out it, you’ll be dead,” I finished for her.

“Life is beautiful, really, it is. Filled with beauty and illusions,” The woman walked up to me and hugged me.

Again.

I walked into my room again.

In my room there was this woman in white standing there, waiting for me. This woman was blonde and was wearing this stunning dress that I spent days looking for online but never found.

“Life is beautiful. Really, it is,” She said as an angel. “Life is great,”

“Without out it, you’ll be dead,” I finished for her.

“Life is beautiful, really, it is. Filled with beauty and illusions,” The woman walked up to me and hugged me.

Once more.

In my own head, I could hear that song from the opening of the movie. I didn't know what it was called but after a few days I found out it’s ‘I love my little rooster’ by Almeda Riddle. It’s creepy and I didn’t want to hear it. But it seemed fitting as well.

I walked into my room.

In my room, there was this woman in white waiting for me. She was smiling and her iris’ were silvery white. She was paler than me, almost like a ghost. This woman was completely in white. She was stunning.

“Life is beautiful. Really, it is,” she said softly, “The mask fits so snug and safely.”

“Filled with beauty and illusions,” I said.

She shook her head. “Alcohol doesn’t heal cuts.”

“The darkness that consumes.”

“The shadows and glooms.”

“Broken, oh so broken.”

The woman in white walked up to me and hugged me. “Everything is pretty in the dark.”

Another explosion. I’m shot up high in the air, breaking the ceiling and out into the atmosphere. From there to the darkness of space and go beyond. Into a nebula unto a black hole where it’s just a tunnel. I was speeding by as everything around me passed by like speeding street lights in the night sky. Everything raced by and everything felt right. Everything felt so eternal.

I heard the ocean and nothing else.

I crashed back into my room where I entered by into my body. It was a sudden stop in a speeding car where I could feel the whiplash in my own body. I blinked and everything back to normal. The walls were still slightly moving and I was still focusing on very small things but everything was back where it should be.

There was no woman in white.

It was just me standing in the same spot for minutes without moving an inch. I looked back and everything was quiet. Chris never said anything like that would ever happen, at least on the dose that he gave me.

I didn’t know if I was experiencing a thought loop walking into my room over and over like that. I at least know it wasn’t really real.

I walked to the poster where the woman in white was standing.“Life is beautiful. Really, it is,” I said to myself then paused. “Life is great.” I stopped “Without out it, you’ll be dead,” I stopped again. “Life is beautiful, really, it is. Filled with beauty and illusions.”

I noticed there was a handprint that wasn’t mine on the poster.