Journey to the Center of the Universe

I was sitting on a bed in my back bedroom on a Friday evening. The room was barren, only a bed and bookshelf. Some transparent tape remained from the posters that were removed from the walls, though curtains still hung in the windows. Someone used to live there. A life took place there, but that had passed months ago when my marriage ended and she left along with my son. The only thing that existed there now was a reminder of my severe depression, easily the worst I had ever felt. One I was certain I’d never recover from.

I wish I could say that the marriage ending was the hard part. It wasn’t. That was the easy part. And it was a relief. It had ended at least a year before I told her it was over, but I still trudged on in a foolish attempt to make it work. It wasn’t about the love lost. It was about time. The investment of energy. The reward versus the risk. Time I lost and would never get back and I had no idea how to move on from this place that I no longer wanted to be in. I needed to start over and had no idea how to even begin.

It was just me, this bed, this bookshelf and this girl I called who claimed she had a solution. Someone who I trusted implicitly with something I was scared to death to try.

That led me to this moment, this desperate attempt to reclaim some sense of self. I felt an object inserted into my hand and I looked over. It was time. I was about to take a leap into a new extreme. This time it seemed to be off the edge of the world. I looked down before placing my headphones on my head and started a song.

I committed. I raised the lighter to the top of a transparent glass pipe and turned the spark wheel releasing a flame into a layer of CBD which served as a bed for the tiny pale white crystals resting on top. I sucked in air and watched the crystals catch fire, releasing smoke which quickly passed through the glass chamber and into my mouth before entering my throat and lungs.

At first it tastes the way burnt electronics smell, this putrid flavor that has no description, but is unmistakable to anyone who has ever experienced it. It quickly begins to turn into something more pleasant and perhaps slightly earthy, something life affirming. Maybe that should’ve been the first indication that my consciousness had begun to shift.

I concentrate on the music in my headphones as I try to ignore the itch growing in my throat. I know to hold it for as long as I can to intensify the effects of the drug. The drug in question is DMT. The purpose? A warm hug from the universe, this feeling of wholeness, this indescribable almost orgasmic feeling that lasts for mere minutes, but allows an internal dialog with one's inner child so intimate that it can only be communicated through feelings. Some people call it the Spirit Molecule, she just called it the Demon Tears.

I point to the girl standing across from me. She’s the only other person in the room. She’s dressed in all black. She’s short. Her hair is wavy and blonde. She’s wearing black makeup, resembling some kind of demonic Kabuki character, but she’s pleasant and kind. Not a shred of evil exists within her. She’s the one that brought this gift to me and walked me through my first experience. This was my second and she knew this was her queue to cut the lights.

The itch in my throat turns to an aggressive burning sensation and I’m forced to release the smoke, coughing hard and as I do I feel this vibration build within me. It starts in my chest and radiates out towards my arms like a shockwave, though the energy seems to grow the further it moves from the epicenter. My heart begins to race.

It reminds me of this rollercoaster I was on once. Rather than slowly raising you and dropping you at a sharp grade, it shoots you off from a dead stop, accelerating to its max speed in less than a second, causing all of your muscles to contract instantly if you aren’t prepared for the sudden shock.

My head is like a radio where someone is rapidly turning the dial looking for a station. Moving the dial forward, the frequency going up and up and for a second all I have is this feeling of being out of phase. There’s a signal. I can hear it, but it's mixed in with the music in my ears and it's distorted like I’ve not quite honed into where I need to be.

I can no longer handle the rush and fall backwards, staring at the ceiling. My vision zooms out until the roof in the room is confined to a single tiny geometric shape, a pentagon, before it doubles. Then triples. Then quadruples. Then all I see are these pentagons that are turning like gears. It’s like a kaleidoscope, but far more magical. The edges of the pentagons are bleeding colors, like a prism.

I close my eyes. I feel like a rocket ship, but I’m reaching the outer limits of space, where gravity no longer applies so I start to feel as though I’m stabilizing. I’m completely tuned into this new frequency and it's no longer mixing with the music. They are their own distinct entities, dancing in their own spaces, creating their own patterns, but not interfering with one another. I feel them, clearly and distinctly. Maybe they were staring each other in the eyes. I wouldn’t know, that was in my periphery. I was concerned with what was in front of me.

The rush stops and this feeling of warmth starts to wash over me. It’s like waves, floating in the Atlantic on a warm summer night. These calm gentle waves that I can simply float with and exist harmoniously within. I open my eyes. The ceiling of the room is no longer there, though, the curtains on the windows are present, floating above me carrying moonlight into the room. The light centers above my head and concentrates for a moment before turning into an entity, resembling a finger, that draws waves identical to the ones I’m feeling in the air as colors start to bleed from them.

At first the waves are red, a deep red, a very calm red. Not like fire, though it is warming, but its building towards something more intense and it ripples across the room like an aurora. It moves back and forth, the wave moving across the sky horizontally, bleeding colors below. For a second I laugh. This is not an easy site to digest, regardless of how beautiful and laughing is the only way I can process the site. I raise my hand to the sky, reaching out to touch it. I feel the warmth from it transfer to my fingertips and spread down my entire body. I can’t help but smile, ear to ear, like those characters from the Blackhole Sun music video.

I reach further, wanting to connect with the light show above my head, stretching my arm further and further. I feel my joints begin to pop as I reach the end of my range and right as I feel I’m about to touch it again it starts to move further into the sky, shifting colors from red, to a deep blue, before warming to a glowing green. Rippling in place above my head in these giant waves, as if it's begging me to chase it. I feel like I’m floating and try to swim towards it, into space, into the night, above the curtains and the moon light.

The colors continue to bleed back down towards me and as I feel them touch me, there’s another wave of pleasure. Then another. Then another. It’s building towards something. This warmth, this pleasure, this security, this feeling akin to orgasm but a thousand times more intense and infinitely more pleasurable. This green light that I am moving towards, that I’m chasing, who is begging to be chased, it feels as though it's embracing me in what is most certainly sexual energy.

I can barely contain the energy and it explodes from me. I feel myself being torn to pieces, violently, yet in complete ecstasy, like my heart just burst from my chest because it found its true soulmate in this green light and it wants nothing more than to join with it forever and won’t rest until it's unified completely and wholly with it. And rather than try to recover this vital part of my person, I let it go embracing this moment and as I do I feel complete and unadulterated joy, love, in what was both romantic and maternal at the same time.

The universe reached out holding me in its arms before giving me a message. Rather than telling me that I was okay and that I was going to be okay, it showed me completely and truly that I am, actively, in this moment okay. And I held onto what felt like an eternity as tears of joy fell from my face, like I was joined with the center of the universe, ground zero of the big bang, the beginning of everything we know and understand, the very place where stardust was formed. It spoke to me. Just like the girl said it would.

That space in that empty room mirrored my soul vacant and undecorated. That was me, a barely living shell, but the choice I made, transformed that room and through that mirror transformed me. It was alive and breathing, as was I, embraced in this green light. This joy and love, it was potential and I wanted to live inside it forever. But things such as this can only be temporary and I felt it release me, reminding me one more time, I am actively okay, in this moment. Right now.

I felt the bed underneath me. The aurora in the sky turned to white before fading into moonlight. The curtains above my head once again. The ceiling back in its proper place. The voice of the universe withdrew from the dance with the music in my headphones. And I felt as though everything was right with the world. A pleasure I had not experienced since I was a child, like being in that place between reality and a wonderful dream. Where one could easily exist within the other and at the center, possibility...something I’d not allowed myself the experience in a long time.