I ingested a new species of hallucinogenic mushroom that my friend had suggested I try. I never saw him again following our trip, and there existed no leads as to his whereabouts or his fate. I believe he was claimed by this seemingly sentient mycotic organism or entity masquerading as such. Fungi, after all, are engulfing, parasitic and even predatory things. The trip that followed convinced me that I may never rid myself of its attachment, and certainly never find my friend.
After an ingestion of a seemingly innocuous molecular compound, the temperature of my chemically contaminated blood begins to rise with the settling in of creeping fatigue. My face begins to flush and glisten in a preliminary film like sweat, with a quality of glossy gossamer. As the hours pass i begin to shake as my hands and fine motor dexterity become compromised. The dark circles and sunken eyes become apparent as I take on the appearance of the quintessential fiend without a fix. As night falls, the clock slows and the minutes become individually wrapped lifetimes of moments on the cusp of panic to be relived by each twitch of the long hand.
My mind, mood and thoughts begin to betray me. Involuntary abhorrent thoughts plunge deeper and deeper below the surface of the realm of reasonable proposition. Once sufficiently descented, far below the depths of the normal people around me who, woefully ignorant of my malady, give puzzled looks as to express suspicion of my condition. The substrate on which my thoughts once stood anchored, begins to cloud with an inky and terrible blackness through which I cease to recognize as my own, but the command of a dark usurper at the helm of my minds circuitry.
In these deceitful depths of this drug or demon induced despair, my current condition manipulatively presents to me as my new normal. No emotion but acute unadulterated grief for a loved one lost resembled its bleak hold. My body, thin, pale and pallid begins to accumulate unbearable weight which at once, taking transcendental effort to mobilize in any form or function. As my body grows heavier, I grow thinner under the oppressive force of the air itself atop my sweat soaked corpse of a body. My nerves begin to awaken with a jolt of panic bent on self preservation as if chased by a determined predatory beast. My muscles, useless while nerves firing every round of electrical ammunition in the armory of my brain, my moment by moment conscious experience becomes an orchestra led by a sadistic conductor playing with such horrifying disharmony I begin to lose any sense of self.
Every physiological process becomes a cacophony of oxymoronic contradiction. No position is bearable save for a few seconds before repositioning becomes necessary to prevent the loss of my sanity. The frayed, raw and wide eyed nerves continue this assault throughout the night and into the day. Greeted by the wrenching of my viscera and the squelching of its contents, I’m tethered to the bathroom. It is then that the intensity and cumulative physical and psychological sum of this hell is at the height of its power. I begin to see flashes of a black tumultuous ocean that’s vastness defied the concept of a horizon, and that it was all that existed beyond the cosmos. Perceiving without the senses the human animal equipped, I feel the dendritic mycelial tendrils breaching my skull and convening with my neurons.
At this point I am fundamentally changed, my brain never to return to its blissfully ignorant state of normalcy. It is true some doors are never meant to be opened, let alone peered into lest they remain ajar leaking wretched insights in nebulous emission. I begin to weep for things I’d long forgotten and things I’ve never known; people I once knew, and people I never would. I become incapable of self consolation as I cannot trust my own thoughts or my own reason. Water flows from my eyes on the whim of this demoniac usurper of my soul. As the nights and days pass reality turns and contracts. Me, devoid of sleep and at the precipice of utter madness at the hands of my tormenter with whom I’d conspired.
At an unspecified point, eventually my mantra begins to pierce the inky melancholic despair. I awake at last having slept a period of time. As the last icy sweats of gooseflesh flutter past me like an ethereal ghost and the last contortions of my gut untie it to its original conformation, I begin to feel the draft of wind leading to the exit of this terrible otherworldly stupor. In the coming days I return, recalibrated to the absence of the contaminating agent. My thoughts return and my body begins to reassemble awaiting the next descent into hell, where I await its next embrace with open arms. Bafflingly so willing to visit again. My own logic is twisted, sharpened and turned against me. I no longer think my own thoughts save for the brief, temporary lapses in its control. Who am…no…. what am I?
Don’t eat the mushrooms…