Lighted
I’m 21. Clueless. Only green. Not even alcohol really.
I’m browsing the internet one frigid, purple-tinged winter evening and come across a website promoting a legal psychedelic. I’m intrigued. Legal? Why?
I don’t order the material from the site. I order the plant. I’m gonna grow it. It shows up at my doorstep a month later, haggard, sickly. I follow the instructions to revive it. It revives.
A month passes. Some leaves fall off. I dry ‘em. I wait until dusk and light a white candle. I add a pipe to the leaves and inhale the smoky harshness. Too harsh. I cough, several times. I inhale again. And one more time.
Lite-Brites explode out to infinity behind closed eyelids. Colors that aren’t supposed to exist melt around dimensions that aren’t supposed to either. The colors coalesce into form and I’m in the back of a yellow school bus. I hear children laughing. I’m ten again. Everything is hazy, dreamlike. The colors reassemble into a clearer form and I’m now lying beside a cozy but roaring fire. Mexican Indians wearing shining, bejeweled sombreros are looking down at me, grinning with a kind but humorous mischievousness. They speak Mazatec, how the hell do I know this? They tell me to relax, everything is okay. I didn’t know I wasn’t. What seems like hours pass and they say goodbye and tip their sombreros, iridescent bulbs burst by the millions. Lite-Brites?
They say I’ll be back.
In my room, I’m drenched with sweat. Everything is glowing and pulsating, breathing. I hear rustling and a faint, almost inaudible whisper. “Pssssss.” I look around. “Psssss,” again. A shadow dances across the wall. The candle. Atop it dances a leprechaun of flame. He performs a shaman’s trance dance. I’m paralyzed.
He slowly fades as does everything else.
What…
The…
Fuck…
Was…
That…?
I’m not sure what to believe.
What was real and what was hallucination?
Strangely, instinctually, it was all real.
True story.