5.

Every drug tale always gets flattened into the same octagonally-shaped directional and this one’s no different, soft as any other, and made of peach-like fuzzy skin—if you squeeze it too hard, you’ll bruise it and the insides will get all sandy and gritty, like a fallen apple, and if you squeeze even harder it might shit itself and you’ll find warm feces drooling down your dominant palm, and if you inject it with all kinds of substances it’ll squirt red just like you or I—it stands in the vacuum of nostalgia, vastly idolized and unbelieved, but it needs only exist so adults with peeled nostrils and wet tissues get to say I told you so, exempting themselves from any responsibility… his name was BLANK—feel at liberty to scribble any name which suits your purposes—and he took some BLANK (you get it) through his eyeball (or his rectum and any other crevice with pores into his cellular soul), and he was never the same—though usually, he dies—the base of every drug soliloquy that bubbles out of mustached mouths and gets sprinkled into alphabet soups and slurped by wide-eyed children in an attempt to save them from the porous and wrinkly pit.

7.

She’s absolutely blasted. I can see her a few tables away, grinning like a madwoman. Her eyes have that unfocused look, her hands lay clasped in her lap, her feet swing of their own accord underneath her. I can tell she’s in deep. It has her every sense commandeered, every inch of her body hums. I glance around the coffee shop and wonder if anyone can tell what’s going on with her. They must, it’s so obvious. 

Since this isn’t the first time I’ve seen her like this, I’ve quickly come to recognize that specific grin, that specific gaze. I saw it walking back from the street the other night, and across from me at dinner, and lying prone on my floor. The thought has occurred to me to be concerned about how quickly she’s changed, but honestly, I’m starting to feel a bit drugged myself, looking at her. And besides, there are worse things she could do than getting drunk on the love of the boy sitting across from her.

3.

A crown of thorns placed on His head

He knew that He would soon be dead

A friend of mine studies philosophy. He buys his shrooms from Russia, from an Etsy seller with no name. He hates women but loves gender; he loves Nietzsche and likes Schopenhauer; he’s anxious about war but never about death. 

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Alleluia, alleluia!

“Slavic shrooms boost testosterone,” he said one day, sighing sorrowfully about how whatever species we secured wasn’t quite good enough. It was late and cold. He looked wolfish that day, gaunt, the way I remember him best. He emptied an entire jar of Vaseline onto his dad’s table and spread it into an even layer. The Amish maple had never looked more luscious, more decadent. We carved our names in the goop and laughed. 

It was my last time doing shrooms. I’ve become able, purposeful, and direct, phoning him every month or so to get his thoughts on my philosophy papers. Last I heard, he was learning calligraphy and sketching out mail bombs. It’s a good friendship, one of my best. 

6.

We skip, hop, and jump through the suspicious brush lining the pier. Broken glass and empty cigarette packs crunch under our feet as we walk towards the center, where a couple people fight with a generator. It is near dead silent. Some rave.

These boots were the wrong call. This entire outfit was the wrong call; a tube top and mini skirt was somehow not ample clothing for this August night. It would not have mattered what I was wearing anyway–the only light on the pier was coming from the buildings across the river.

Everything about this night so far has been slightly disappointing. And then I am handed a dime bag and a key. And then two bumps of K are singing my nasal cavity as they go down. And then things are not so bad. Lights are flashing, music is finally playing, my boots are no longer pinchy, and I am dancing.

At some point, my friend disappears. At some point, she reappears, and she is soaking wet.

I fell in.

What?

She takes off her shirt and wrings it out. I am too sedated to process any of this. And so I just keep dancing.

1.

Two years ago, when visiting my parents during winter break, my mom informed me of a riveting development in her life as an empty-nester: she had taken to growing shrooms. My mom had been hesitant to tell me. Apparently she had started prior to my fall break, but thought I would be horrified to know. I wasn’t, just more intrigued. How had my mom–who only drank sips from my father’s occasional beers and whose most recent experiences from weed were during her chemo–been spawned into the suburban mom shroom scene?  My mom informed me that a neighborhood friend had introduced her months ago to a new friend, a mom who had a shroom hobby. After hearing from this friend about the demanding needs of shrooms (and the benefits of microdosing), my mom grew interested in developing her own fungal farm; and under the guidance of her new suburban shroom sensei, she became a mycelium mother. My mom was clearly quite animated about her new hobby and offered to show me her shroom room. After donning masks and gloves (to avoid contamination), my mom led me into the dark room that used to be my sister’s before college and held the fruits of her labor. My mom presented various Tupperware containers containing an array of shrooms of all sizes and life stages, and explained her relative success in growing each shroom strain. After her show-and-tell, I asked my mom the question lingering in the back of my mind: had she ever tripped? My mom assured me she had not and that she only gave her fully grown shrooms to her friend to be developed into micro-dosing capsules. I wasn’t 100% certain whether I trusted her, but at the end of the day, I was just happy she had a new hobby. 

2.

The first thing I told my incoming roommates is that I have a Benadryl addiction. It is devastatingly true. Sometimes I will be on the brink of sleep and remember how much better this sleep would be if I popped a Benadryl and thus will groggily waddle to my self-made medicine cabinet under my desk and pop a Benadryl. 

My medicine cabinet largely contains Benadryl and many open boxes of Dayquil, as during the perpetual sickness of my freshman fall, I often took the Nyquil of the Dayquil/Nyquil boxes, leaving me with a large amount of opened boxes of likely slightly oxidized Dayquils. I feel it is important to note that I haven’t taken Nyquil yet for Benadryl-like purposes. What’s more striking about my affection for Benadryl is not simply that I reach for it, but just that I have a whole lot of it. Right now, I have four boxes in my cabinet. It reminds me of how during COVID, everyone took all the toilet paper and how we still have a lot of toilet paper in our garage. That isn’t to say Benadryl is my toilet paper or anything (even I can’t possibly go through four boxes in the next nine months; by that I mean I’ve been exaggerating this whole time), but I do wonder what will happen when all these Benadryl expire. I presume I will still take them. 

4.

SMU. Snow Mountain University. Southern Millionaires. Sorority of the Melancholy and Underweight. Whatever the euphemism, it was here that I understood the weight of love in a Gummy.

“They’re 175 milligrams each, but half of them are duds. Take half and don’t worry.” Ok. There were three of us. If two of them were duds and one of them wasn’t, I’d be on Mars and my friends would be on planet Earth—Minecraft Earth.

Superbad. Never seen it. The movie just got better and better. Michael Cera, you know, his nose is a little crooked, but I think it enhances the movie. Michael Cera’s nose… that’s deep. Humans are so obsessed with symmetry, so duped by beauty! Emma Stone is too beautiful for this. Give me Michael Cera’s schnoz.

The characters started dating around and having awkward sex. Becca said something that made me want to throw up to Michael Cera. But this too was profound. Real stuff. Young love is clumsy, muddy, the colors of Hawaii’s rainbow!

And then I went to the bathroom and just one color was there, big and green, and under my eyes. McLovin. Love. If Superbad is bad, I don’t want to know.

8.

I had a dream our airplane touched down in Candy Land. I jumped out of the plane and started eating the grass. I was high immediately. I spun in circles until I was blind dizzy, and it started snowing. Each snowflake that melted on my tongue made me shudder. I rolled in the snow down a hill to a lake of pure blue. I began lapping at the water like a dog. You don’t need fun to have alcohol. A leprechaun on a unicorn wearing a rainbow-colored unitard joined me, and we drained it. Then we smelled the salts at the bottom of the lake. We started floating and growing larger and larger until we were like blimps. The air was as crisp as an apple, and I bit out chunks of the sky. Jazz melted my bones. Honey on my tongue. The clouds were cotton candy, and eating them made me ecstatic and horny–I was salivating. I writhed in the air, longing for someone to hold onto, but the feeling passed, and I felt numb.

I grew and grew and kicked the Earth out from under me. I was floating in space until my feet grazed the floor. I didn’t know there was a floor in space. I walked over to the sun and tried to grab it, but it burned my hand. I poured some of the space water at my feet on it and it cooled down, burning red instead of white. I plucked it out of its orbit and ate it in one bite. Light came out of my eyes and my ears and my nose and my navel and my hands and my feet and then all of my skin turned to pure luminance. I started vibrating, and that started shaking the space ground. The universe was trembling. Some stars fell out of their orbits and plopped into the dark pool at my feet. Then space-time shattered and everything collapsed. The plane at my feet, infinitely far below me, was shallow water with broken stars glowing like drowning lightning bugs. I screamed. A howl of primal rage. Then I cried, sinking to my knees with my face in my hands. I picked up a fragment of a star and held it to my eye. I stuck it in my eye. 

Then I could see everything for what it was. I was back in Newark. My flight from AMS was over. The security guards were eyeing me, and my roommate was seething. I didn’t care. My eyes had apprehended the cosmos. I bolted from the waiting room; an Olympic sprinter couldn’t have caught me. I wanted to be alone. 

I’m writing this in the notes app on my phone in the EWR terminal-five men’s room, stall four, standing on the toilet. What I saw at the end of my drug-induced revelation wasn’t God, or Aliens, or the Simulators of our reality–I saw myself for what I was: terminally ill. The substances were quite affecting, but the meat of my mental malaise was what I had learned about myself. 

This is my official letter of resignation from Princeton University. I am also revoking my citizenship from the United States of America and will not be paying taxes. I hereby cancel my subscriptions, and my library books will not be returned. I name my successor as the executor of my estate. I’ll eke out a meager existence for the rest of my days cowering in the inevitably of my death and wishing I had more time. I wasted my youth when I was young. I’m told I can only expect to live another 60 to 70 years. Death comes to us all.