The Way She Still Feels

05/15/2024

Preface

On the second to last Saturday of a recent April, I found myself on an unintentional mushroom trip. 

This happened to be the thorax of a bad, unrelenting, multi-city cold. And right before a gnarly, week-long toothache debacle. Morale was…very low. I went into foraging mode: perhaps a snack would make my feelings ancy just a little bit less.

Scrounging around my room, I happened upon unmarked chocolates in a duffel bag. My feelings convened a short jury and deliberated (correctly) that it was reasonable to eat the entire thing. Impatience, Indifference, and Isolation signed the bill as Sponsors and Whips, sending signals to the fingers to start unpacking the melty dopamine treat.

Twenty minutes or so later, my left arm started vibrating. I was surprised it wasn’t a visible quake with muscled tremors and all: it felt like a pre-millenium, car trunk subwoofer. But in my arm.

Two and a half hours later, you bubbled up :)

—

A Warm, Familiar Tinge

The first you I felt was an abstract you - the “idea” of Sarah Bell. This blobby, pink-purple floatsy that kept moving through me like we were both two temporal jellyfish teleporting time together, producing bright, confidant blue and purple and green bursts every time we occupied each other’s spaces.

And in my heart’s mind - I swear there is such a thing, brimming with blood and emotion, trapped by electrical patterns too - I lit up that same blue-purple-y-green color. My heart smiled so very deeply. They do that too.

There was also acute you, an array of stills and gifs from our time that blobby you would put into the projector. Blobby, abstract, bright, vibrant purple you would pass into my chest, and like that little Windows screensaver box, it would hit a specific spot. Then, there you would be, in front of a green screen in my head with a background carousel fading into itself as you posed, laughed, napped, noshed, nuzzled, nerded, nodded, knew. 

I hugged each of those reels so tightly, pushing their spiritual vitamins into my heart, absorbing all of them again like I did in the moments they were first created with you: 

Chasing each other around the Georgetown apartment. 

Watching you hold your hat as the wind tried to steal it on a beach in Emerald Isle. 

Knocking on your door in Nairobi because I missed you at the airport the night before.

Watching my queen dancing on a camel along the shores of Mombasa as the sunrise greeted the new year.

Painting a bathroom completely black and naming it “The Vortex” between giggles.

Every single night I told you I loved you before falling asleep. And every one I didn’t.

—

I also cried a lot when you passed through me. Not bad crying, though there was pain. Reliving that I didn’t have the endurance for us still hurts. I was the best I could be then, and it was not enough to hold us on this wonderful, sandy path we had already carved.

This section measures correctly against the happy:sad ratio on this mushroom trip by the way: 90% happy, 10% sad. The sad was well understood and accepted, so it went as quickly as it appeared.

—

Still, Dearly, Always

You’re still with me here, deeply. Shrooms don’t lie, ha.

On this trip, I felt all the times we have found each other in each of the lives we have lived humming just underneath my skin. Just a few light touches and I got to travel to some place, and you were there too, and it was and always will be home. 

All your touches and whispers shrunk down to an atomic you, and there you are nestled in between every atomic me.

Now, every time I brush my nails, whether along my forearm or face, you vibrate just below the trace. A residual, shroomy super power perhaps…

I can tell which vibration is the “us” in this life, too. The vibration we remember most clearly until we shift again. The last step of a Viennese waltz, both of us leading: you by instinct, me by duty.

—

Holding you like I did on Saturday, simply, only in my heart, was pure joy. I felt everything that I was, and everything that you and I were, and it was overwhelming love and tender memory. Unintentional joy ride, ha.

The crying definitely went deep, and I am starting to ache a bit as I write this, and I’ve had enough of aches lately between a long cold and a gnarly tooth issue. So, I’m just going to wrap up!

—

I am truly stupefied at how illogically permeated you are throughout my mind and heart. It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful.

I love you still, dearly, and always.

—

PS a cocktail finish to this seems relevant.

Curtains on the Floor of a Stage

1.5oz gin

.5oz chartreuse

.25oz fernet

.25oz lemon juice

a tiny splash of grenadine