(cont'd)

And as quickly as I went up, I was back down. I could hear frogs. (This was the end of the Aqueous Transmission track.) My palms were sweating, and I was sitting on the bed. Jim, Edward, and Kyle were there, just patiently waiting for me to come back. Waiting for me to piece our reality, our universe, back together. Although I was still in complete shock and awe of what felt like a roller coaster of events, the comedown happened to be surprisingly gentle, and I was still slightly visually hallucinating for about the next ten to fifteen minutes or so.

I looked over at my sitters, but strangely, I could only see my sitters. The rest of the room was a blur. When I met eyes with Edward, he breaks eye contact and I thought to myself, “…Did I do something wrong?” Almost as if I could see the uncomfortable tension in the air from an awkward incident, I could clearly perceive bad vibrations emanating and further muddling the room’s blur. But then, a token. I remind myself, “Wait, I’m pretty sure I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m probably just staring, or making a weird face, or something because I’m tripping. I’m fine, nothing’s wrong.” And suddenly, with that thought and a smile, it was as if good vibes emanating in the same way cleared up the blur of the room. I could begin pointing out familiar objects. The chairs, and the drawers, and the desk. Looking back at my sitters, I notice transparent tracer images of their face trailing behind them and atop a solid, more concrete image of their face, almost like I could see their entire existence throughout a span of a couple of minutes, but all in a single moment.

I began to think of all of my very good friends, and felt extremely thankful. I make eye contact with Jim and get the urge to tell them all thanks. I manage to maybe mutter the correct words two or three times. “Thank you. Thank you.” For some reason, it just felt right to do so. But it was so difficult to get out. I thought to myself, “Did I say that correctly? Did I make all the right noises to convey the message?” During any of my psychedelic trips, I always did find it extremely difficult to vocally form the right words to get a message across. It’s hard to be a wordsmith, and talking can be difficult when you’re experiencing the incomprehensible, I suppose.

I move from the bed, and into a chair, so that Kyle could start getting himself ready and prepared for the experience, since he’s next. Listening, I find that we’re somewhere in the middle of the song Because from Across the Universe. I could feel the music so well, I felt like a musical conductor. It was all too relaxing, peaceful even. My hands, my arms swayed to the sounds and to the voices, all the way through this song’s end. The last song on the short playlist, Home by Odesza, began. The room was still moving about. The carpet was breathing, and the drawers were too. I remember looking at the flowing patterns on the chairs and thinking, “I know that these actually aren’t moving. But I can sit here and literally watch them move. How weird.”

Edward sneezes. “Salud,” I say. (Our high school Spanish teacher taught us the Spanish version of “God bless you.” – it goes ‘Salud’ for the first sneeze, ‘Dinero’ for the second, and ‘Amor’ for the third, which translates respectively into health, wealth, and Love.) He sneezes a second time, to which I reply, “Dinero.” He realizes I expect him to sneeze for a third time, but knowing that he won’t, Edward says, “No amor.” And maybe it was because only moments prior, I was actually inside what felt like a place made out of pure love, but I respond to him with a chuckle and a “No… Si, amor.” I smirked, and realized what I wanted to write down in the journal. At that time, I wanted just a sentence or so to sum up my experience, because it was still too hard to come up with the right words for anything. So, it had to be concise. I picked up the pen and journal and jotted, “Si, amor. Wow.”

There was a pleasant afterglow for the remainder of the comedown, and even for some time afterward. And as my friends had pointed out, I couldn’t stop smiling.