December of 2019, everything in my life felt wonderful. I was happily in love with a guy who was happily in love with me. We travelled the world together, I made good money, lived on my own in a beautiful NYC apartment. I had friends, my nephew was just born, and everything felt wonderful.
As a result of my new relationship I had been introduced to recreational drugs. Nothing too insane, but he had given me my first ecstasy, MDMA, ghb, coke and ketamine. He was far more experienced at this and the party life than I was so I always listened to his counsel and always took his precautions - as a result almost every experience had been a great one with no negative consequences or scary situations/
Luckily, as a tall man who was almost 40, I didn’t have a lot of tolerance and so many decades without it and I could feel all the fun things without coming close to ODing. though I had fun with them, I only saved them for partying, once a month or so when we would visit each other.
It was a Monday night and I had just got back home from our vacation together - we had decided to meet for a weekend party in Mexico City. As I unpacked my bag I again got lost in the memories. Dancing with him, the incredible sex, walking in the mountains, our laughing together before the flight in my now intermediate spanish before his trip to Bogota, and then I saw it.
We were in the honeymoon phase and we always liked to leave each other little gifts - I saw a small box at the very bottom of my toiletry bag, wrapped around one of his new pair of CK black briefs. I smiled as I could feel the scent of him and imagined him quietly tucking this little gift away while I was asleep. Him leaving me small gifts in underwear was our little thing - a combination of intimacy and sexiness.
A brief note in Spanish, my special nickname, his aggressive clunky writing. Thanking me for a great weekend and telling me how much he loved to watch my sleep. There in the box was a small dried flower, the bracelets to one of the parties, and I laughed as I saw the last item. A nearly filled plastic big of tusi. The new party drug I had tried that weekend, somewhat of a mix of ketamine and ecstasy with a fresh raspberry scent. I had LOVED it and had wondered what happened to the last bag.
I texted him a picture of it with my thanks. We sent each other a few quick videos and he went to bed. Since I was off the next 2 days from work, I decided to do a bump. I put on the playlist that reminded me of him and happily relived the last few months, of going from friends to boyfriends. I did another bump, and then another. I was so happy, I was so grateful.
I woke up on my couch, terrified. It was almost 4am. The music was off and my candles had burned out.
I had just had a horrible nightmare…but it wasn’t a nightmare, it was a “test” - my mouth spoke the words that my mind couldn’t wrap my head around. A test. I had sudden deep flashbacks as I was dozing off. Losing all of my identity, my consciousness being brought somewhere.
I went somewhere.
I looked at the table and saw it, I had gone to 7-11. I could “remember” the trip, I had no idea who I was. I had no idea what this world was, what my ID was. I was dressed, but wearing two different pairs of sneakers. I could REMEMBER the chilly air on my face, but why did I go to 7-11? the items I bought were nothing I would’ve gotten usually. Random things. I could remember the clerks face. It had to have been 2 or 3 in the morning.
One pervasive thought kept happening. Someone else had been driving. Driving? Who? Driving You.
And it was a test. How did I know it was a test. I could vaguely remember something feel “happy” that I passed the test.
I looked over at the bag of tusi, positive that there was something bad in it, never in my year of experimenting did I ever experience anything like that. I weighed and saw there was still about 3/4 of it, so I hadn’t taken too much. I weighed going ito the emergency room - flashes of long embarrassing conversations flashed before my eyes. I felt okay now, just really weirded out. I had “come down” from other drugs before and you kinda remember the things you said or felt with a little bit of embarrassment, but this was different. This was ….something else entirely.
Still. better safe then sorry and I tossed it in the garbage. I popped an ambien, lit some more candles, turned on a relaxing YouTube video and went to sleep.
I woke up and it was almost 1:30 in the afternoon. I felt refreshed and ready to face the day. The weird feelings from the night before all seemed to be wrapped up in a bad trip. No big deal.
This was my last week of work before we closed for the year. I was going to spend a week with family for Christmas, and then going to Colombia to visit the boyfriend until the first week of January. I had a few things to finish before the office closed, so spent the day doing errands, writing out lists, getting prepared.
.I kept thinking back to that weird 7-11 trip. feeling like I was watching something else control me. And feeling a sense of unease that something was “noticing” my internal thoughts, almost with humor.
The next few days passed without incident, but I couldn’t quite shake this weird feeling.
Friday night, a buddy came over and we watched a few horror movies. Half-way through the second one, he fell asleep and started gently snoring. I reached over him to grab the bowl of popcorn and almost dropped the bowl.
One of my favorite pictures in my apartment is this beautiful dark tree against a bright moonlight. And the picture was moving.
I couldn’t describe it exactly, it was just…moving. Like the colors were all shimmering. I was sure it was a trick of the light, a mental response to the movie and maybe that weird incident from earlier this week, but no, clear as day something was…happening in this picture.
I quietly pulled out my cell phone and began to record it. Interestingly enough through the cell phone the picture seemed to be covered in an almost white mist, too thick to even see through. But when I lowered the phone, the white mist departed and I could see the weird shimmering almost circular motions in the moon and the top part of the tree. I eventually woke my friend up and as he got ready to go home , I asked him if he saw anything weird about the picture.
HE squinted for a second and said: “I think Im seeing things, but it looks darker or something - anyway the movie probably has you freaked out”
He left, and I curled up with my cat and kept watching the picture. While eventually getting almost comfortable with it, what started having my hair on ends was when I noticed my cat was staring at it too. I recorded him doing so and saw the cell phone was filled with little white orbs circling me, the bed, and most of all the picture. I sighed. Grabbed the picture and tossed it in a closet, turned on a few lights and tried to go to sleep.
The next day I woke up and in the bright cold morning of December the world seemed safer. I took the picture out of the closet and it looked normal, laughing to myself I went about my day and got a bunch of stuff ready for the visit with my family. Did some last minute Christmas shopping, packed some bags and made arrangements for my buddy to take care of my cat.
Spending the week with family was amazing. I ate a lot, caught up wth everyone and the weird events of what happened in my apartment fell to the wayside. I returned home on the 27th and my flight to Bogota was the 29th so I had another day or so to relax, recover from my family, do some laundry and prepare for the new year.
I arrived back home at my apartment at almost midnight. My buddy had been apartment watching for me and the place looked absolutely fantastic - he had even moved the bed and some of the pictures around. We caught up for awhile and then he decided to head back to his aparmtnent, I took care of his Uber, hugged him goodbye and thanked him again and exhausted, collapsed in my bed.
It was 5:30 when I woke up. And what greeted me was nothing short of a horror movie.
My fire alarm. A basic white fire alarm, commonly found in every apartment in New York City, had morphed.
There was always two lights. Two lights in a plain white fire alarm, but that was no longer what I was seeing.
It became 3d…the shadows around the alarm extended almost comically forming a forest, but it wasn’t a forest, the shadows were moving, the way the picture moved. I stared in shock and disbelief. I hadn’t taken drugs in more than 2 weeks, I was very awake and was seeing something that was beyond comprehension. The two lights turned into …people, almost children. The green lights became lanterns and they walked through this forest maze endlessly. Anytime their “light” got close to the shadows the darkness would retreat, almost playfully in a sea of little tiny shadow creatures, and then they would return.
In a million years, I ‘d never be able to imagine this, to think about this, to describe this. I could almost HEAR the children with the lanterns, walking around endlessly in circles like a creepy Tim Burton movie.
I quietly took my cell phone from the table, as though making a sound would somehow disturb this entirely way too creepy scene taking my place on my ceiling.
When I hit record, the image immediately fell away. It was just a boring fire alarm, but it almost looked like I was watching it through a heavy static channel. When I lowered my phone, it converted back to the childen in the maze. When I raised it, it was just a very stat-icy fire alarm.
What was happening to me?