Hey, Reddit. I need to share this with you all. This is my first post, so please excuse any errors.
After getting off work a couple nights ago, I decided to spend the evening with a couple of friends, just guys from highschool and college who I’d managed to keep up with over the years. It was just going to be drinks and conversation at first, maybe video games if we felt up for it. But one of the guys – I’ll call him Cedro – had a baggie of what looked like ground-up glitter and grass that he wanted all of us to try.
There were four of us, myself included. OC, and Alex were the other two. Cedro said he had an eighth of whatever it was to split between all of us.
“It’s like, LSD. But you smoke it,” he said.
We’re all in our early twenties, but in that moment, I swear to God Cedro looked fifteen. I feltfifteen. It was that feeling of being invincible, like the world was all yours, and even though you were just some kid from Philly, it would all come together in a few years when you turned eighteen. Like, somehow, you’d have it all figured out; you’d be rich and life would be exhilarating and everything you’d dreamed of, every second of every day.
Something about feeling that way again had me hooked – especially since I’m at the age where I’m constantly coping with a reality that has only now decided to show itself and all the worst parts of being alive. I felt young. I had longed for that feeling for years, uncertain of where it had gone or when the last time I’d felt it was. Just before a big football game, maybe? At high school graduation? In fourth grade, during the early morning hours just before a field trip when I couldn’t sleep? I worried sometimes that I’d lost the feeling forever, that adulthood had drained me of it, but the look in Cedro’s eyes was contagious. Everyone felt it.
“An eighth between four people?” OC was hesitant, though his eyes never left the baggie. “You sure that’s enough?”
Cedro nodded. “Trust me.”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, and Alex nodded.
“Yeah, you can’t just be putting anything in your body,” Alex said. “That could be half meth for all we know.”
Cedro rolled his eyes, gently pressing the small beads within the bag in between his forefinger and thumb. He didn’t seem bothered at all by our hesitance or comments. “I’ve done it before. If that’s not enough for you guys, then okay, you’d don’t have to try it. But it’s a whole lot of fun.”
I didn’t know what to think. Objectively, putting some random drug that could only be described as “like LSD” sounded like a terribly self-destructive idea. Anyone who cared about their well-being would look the other way. But, at the same time, just because it was unfamiliar didn’t necessarily mean it was bad, and, who knew, what if it turned out to be an amazing, life-changing experience? I’d been doing reckless shit since I was a kid, and I’d been lucky enough. I felt like the universe was on my side, rooting for me, making sure I wasn’t one of those unlucky kids who ended up with his life ruined because he got caught smoking one time. This would be no different.
Plus, if Cedro had done it before, then it couldn’t be that bad. I’d known him for years, and he was actually the one to introduce me to drugs in the first place. He’d handed me my first-ever joint, rolled between his calloused fingers.
“I’m down,” I said. My excitement grew. So what if the other guys weren’t gonna try? I wanted to see what it was like, why it affected Cedro the way it did so that he looked purely obsessed.
Nobody else moved. I guess it was just gonna be Cedro and I.
We didn’t speak of the baggie again until it was just us two. Alex and OC stayed for a few to catch up over drinks, but as the sun began to set, they got up to leave. Handshakes, see-you-soons. We went through goodbyes and sent Alex and OC on their way. As soon as the door shut behind them, Cedro and I returned to the couches.
“So, what’s it do to you?” I asked as Cedro worked with the substance on the coffee table. He’d dumped some of it onto a plate and was dripping water onto it. It turned dark with the liquid, not unlike dirt in the rain. Nothing special. He pressed it with his finger and held the lighter close to it, to cook it or to dry, I’m not sure I remember. Once he was finished fifteen minutes later, Cedro packed it into his vaporizer and held the lighter beneath the warming end.
“I can’t even explain it,” Cedro said. The drug had no smell through the vaporizer even when put to the flame. “It’s incomprehensible to me when I’m off the drug, but it really just feels like I’m one with the universe. Like, I feel connected to everyone and everything.”
“So, like, just acid?” I was growing disappointed. Maybe Cedro just had a surprisingly good trip and convinced himself he’d found the drug, when really some dealer had buffed him with ground shrooms and literal glitter.
“No, dude, it’s like, for real. Like, when I smoke it, I feel like I am literally the universe. It’s not just that I get it, it’s that I am it. I am the person walking on the other side of the street. I can see his entire life and all of his memories flash before me. I am the clouds in the sky and everywhere they’ve been, all of the oceans they used to be a part of and will one day be part of again. I am past and present. I am time. I know how everything works, how it all came to be. Dude, this drug is life.”
I laughed. So he did have a good trip. He sounded like your typical, floaty, mush-brained user. Well, I could at least humor him and have a good time.
“Alright, alright, so you knew everything?” I joked. I wanted to poke a hole in his little theory so he could see how drugged-out he sounded. “So, you’re telling me that if I took this drug with you, I would suddenly be able to solve complex math? I would know if Michael Jackson was really dead? Really, Cedro?”
I shoved him playfully, and he glared at me. I’d almost knocked the vaporizer out of his hands.
“I know it sounds corny, but just try it. Or don’t. No one’s making you.”
“I’m gonna try it,” I said. “I’m sure it’s exactly what you described.”
He motioned for the speaker with his head, and I turned on some music. R&B and anything that made us feel suspended in midair. I found a package of cookies in one of the cabinets and brought that along with a few other snacks back from the kitchen with me. I prepared several glasses of water and set them on the bottom shelf of the TV stand, a place that was safe but not too far away in case we got couch locked.
Cedro had taken a few hits at this point, and as I set things up around the room and moved dangerous things out of reach, he would motion for me to come over and he’d hold the vaporizer out to me.
I think it took around an hour or two to really hit me, which is weird for smoking. In that time, Cedro and I just talked. He mostly avoided questions about the drug, though sometimes he’d fail to hold back his smile.
“Just wait,” he’d say, with that kiddish look. I envied him and how childish he could be. God, I missed being a kid.
Being fifteen and worry-less. No job. No bills. No responsibilities. All I did was fuck around and go adrenaline-seeking. Making memories. I had one of those childhoods that kids dreamed of. I was lucky. The genetic lottery had chosen me, but adulthood spared no one. Soon, nobody cared about my old touchdowns, and my friends didn’t have time for mudding or late-night walks. I had to move on, whether I liked it or not.
I must’ve been high for nearly an hour before I realized. My thoughts had whisked me away; I was so focused on everything coming in and out of my mind that I forgot about reality. I struggled to maintain a grip on my surroundings. Cedro seemed to be in a similar state, but it seemed more like he was aware that he was high and was choosing to let it take him.
I reached for one of the glasses, and, suddenly, Cedro’s hand was around my wrist. He was looking at me, his eyes wide, searching into my own. His pupils were dilated and massive, demanding. Sweat glistened on the high points of his face. Pieces of his hair swung in front of his eyes like dark blades.
“Cedro?” my voice sounded far-off. I wanted so desperately to join it, wherever it was, to be grounded in its reality because mine kept shifting.
His grip only tightened. I felt the molecules of his skin fusing with my own. It felt like Cedro was melting into me. As I looked into his eyes, I saw everything. The car accident he barely survived. The fights between Cedro and his father. I saw his ex-girlfriend, beaten and crying. I saw what he did to her.
And I saw his first home-run. I saw Cedro graduate for the second time; I saw myself at eighteen, clapping for him in the crowd. The money he gave to strangers. The time he spent picking out my twentieth birthday gift. His newborn niece in his arms, the tears streaming down his face.
“What are we doing?” his voice sounded pained, and I felt it. Deep in my chest, I understood exactly what he was referring to. This was no way to live. I felt nauseous with grief.
“I don’t know,” my voice trembled.
“When will it end?”
Black tears were streaming down his face now. They left streaks that seemed to glimmer, like an oil spill on a hot day. Iridescent and hypnotizing. He wasn’t speaking anymore. His words seemed to be coming to me straight from his head. We only looked at each other for the next several hours as we spoke silently about what had happened to us.
How did this happen? I remember him asking.
I got scared.
I did, too.
We were both crying throughout the entirety of this exchange. Our tears filled up the living room, flooding around us. But we stayed sitting on the sofas, fully-submerged, looking at one another and weeping through dark water.
How do we fix it?
I think we need to talk to Him. To us.
I can’t reach that part of me.
We have to, Cedro. We can’t back away. We need every piece for this to work.
I’m weak, Miscael, his eyebrows furrowed together, and I remember beads of black sweat dripping from them. They formed into bubbles that floated up to the ceiling.
So, that’s it? We stay living this way? Like servants? We are the universe, Cedro. Why are we worshipping; why do we plead for what is already ours? Who have I been asking for forgiveness all these years? Nobody? I asked him, angry. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.
I don’t want to do this anymore, either, but what other option do we have? We did this to ourselves!
Cedro and I were nailed to the cross. We ate at the round table. We built the Trojan horse. Cedro and I invented light. We discovered that first of that California gold. We climbed Mount Everest. We died eating eloté on a busy street. Cedro and I did it all. We crashed our cars on purpose with our children inside them. We murdered our cheating wives. We did cocaine off the breasts of dead strippers. We got shot selling weed. We burnt people alive. We started wars.
It was Cedro and I, and it was you, Reddit. We were all there.
Is there any way back? I asked him. His back was turned to me, now. He stood facing the wall across from me, unmoving.
Why do we speak when we know what the other is to say? No, Miscael.
We are God.
We are. Then?
Then? We can do anything. We can fix this. We have enslaved ourselves to ourselves, Cedro. Brother. We can fix this.
Cedro tossed his head back and mimicked a laugh. He placed his hands on his belly and shook, then bent over like it had overpowered him. He was hunched over, convulsing with silent laughter, surrounded by black water that moved around him. It felt like a punch to the face. Like abandonment and mockery.
So, it’s this, then? For eternity? We work and we suffer?
Cedro shrugged his shoulders and left the room. He didn’t look at me.
Suddenly, the room was dry. The glass of water in my hand was half-empty, condensation still forming an outline around my fingers. Cedro could have been sleeping on the couch next to me.
The room around me shimmered. I wasn’t sober yet. It felt like I knew the name of every atom in the room, like the carpet and I were ex-best-friends. Like the window and I had played catch. Everything felt so intimate. I could visualize the relationship I shared with everything in the room – my body that I sometimes neglected; the sofa that I kicked up my dirty shoes on; those dirty shoes,man, that I never washed anymore. There was also the stove that I spent working with, cooking up heaven in the basement of that Philadelphia home; there were the doorknobs around that house that knew my every hello and goodbye; there was the mirror that never lied to me, the human on the other side.
I needed to see him. I needed to talk to him, that man on the other side of the mirror.
I half-stumbled, half-floated into the bathroom. I turned on the tap so no one could hear me from the outside, a bad habit of my self-conscious mind. Locked the door. Pulled the curtain all the way open.
Then I looked.
A state of knowing.
Reddit, we were there when the universe first came together. There was no big-bang, no Father, Son, or the Holy-Spirit, no Buddha, no science. There was us. Our free-floating souls. We weren’t nameless; we were separate but unified, and we were nothing if not the beginning of everything. Almost invisible. Radiant colors that over-time would have mixed to form pure and endless blackness.
We were divided.
He’d been getting jealous. Jesus, from the center of us. Centuries passed without conflict, but there was a flash of light. Bright red, pulsing. It was like shattering glass, the way we each fell into ourselves. Like pieces of chipped pottery on a concrete floor. That is what became of our universe, of our knowing.
We thought that He did it because He was better, somehow. Stronger, and more capable. But we were the same. He’s no better than us; we’re just afraid. Afraid of that knowing that He has hidden from us in the backs of our own minds. Afraid of being shattered like that again. Afraid of what we are capable of.
Reddit, we are the same as that man we call our savior. We are Him. We have died and lived again. We turned water into wine. We flooded our earth. We condemned the unworthy. We punished them; we died alongside them. It was by our own doing that we have lost ourselves.
Does any of this make sense? I saw that we were God. We are God. Split-consciousness is the only way to describe it. We have slowed ourselves down with the likes of Christianity and those other religions that suppress us – that tell us that we are indebted to our Creator, that we are not enough, that we must earn love, that this life was intended to be anything other than a planet-wide orgy.
I saw God in the mirror yesterday. I saw Him walking past my window, bobbing His head to whatever was blaring through His headphones. I saw Him buying groceries. I saw Him two-months-old and in the arms of His mother, sobbing. I saw him greened-out and convulsing on the couch across from me. He was afraid of Himself. If you look closely enough into any one of His eyes, you can see it in the very bottom. Fear.
We are every discarded cigarette, every orgasm, every broken bone; we are life before death and life after, and whatever comes in between.
Reddit, we are the universe. We are all God. To believe anything different must be blasphemy.
I am going to try this drug again very soon. Cedro already has some, but he said to wait a bit in between trips for full effects. I’ll update this if I find anything else out, and if anyone has any idea what this stuff actually is, please let me know.